Questions linger over China dam plans
Beijing flexes muscles over Mekong River
SINGAPORE: For hundreds of thousands of people living on its banks stretching from China through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, the river is their lifeline. Flash flooding last month from the failure of an auxiliary dam at a hydroelectricity plant being built along a tributary in southern Laos killed about 30 people. It also caused widespread damage to local economies, leaving at least 6,000 homeless and raising questions about how the river is managed.
But the river matters well beyond trade and commerce. Money has poured in as countries compete to built hydro-power plants. For smaller, poorer states like Cambodia and Laos, the investment is welcome, even if it comes with strings attached.
China, by far the biggest power in the region, and where the Mekong starts up in the Tibetan plateau, is increasingly using its economic clout to secure its broader aims. Greater control over the Mekong — known as Lancang in China — through to Vietnam gives Beijing a bigger say over the use of the river’s key resources, and leverage to press countries to fall into line.
“The full brunt of this influence has not yet been demonstrated but, if exercised, it has the power to create famine, civil unrest, and potentially topple governments,” said Elliot Brennan, a Bangkokbased research fellow at the Institute for Security & Policy Development.
With China having already built six major dams on the upper part of the river, and with plans to build another 21, its ability to store and release water during the dry season is set to increase.
The Mekong is sometimes described by observers as the next geopolitical flashpoint for the region. While it is not at the level of the disputed South China Sea, the Mekong may eventually matter even more. That’s because of its value as an arterial waterway to the sea, through the food bowls of Southeast Asia, where rice and other key crops are farmed, for the fish it carries, and as a tourist destination.
In both the Mekong and South China Sea, China is deploying a carrots and sticks approach. While its companies have helped finance the expanding network of dams along the river, China has also sought to maximize its say on how the entire Mekong is run.
Established in 1995, the Mekong River Commission was for 20 years the main mechanism for managing the river among Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. That changed in 2016, when China officially launched the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism.
Rather than work with the MRC, which it is not part of, China focused on building the LMCM into a body that helps promote the development of western China, and complements its Belt and Road Initiative of expanding trade routes to Europe.
With a membership that includes all mainland Southeast Asian states, the LMCM has a broader scope than the MRC. It addresses political and security issues such as health, education and infrastructure as well as the sustainable development of the river and cross-border economic and strategic cooperation.
The US meanwhile has focused on the Lower Mekong Initiative, a partnership set up in 2009 to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth in the subregion. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at a meeting of the group in Singapore on Friday, cited the Southeast Asian states as key strategic partners.
“Creating equitable, sustainable, inclusive growth for the sub-region not only contributes to Asean countries and Asean’s centrality, but also to a free and open IndoPacific,” Mr Pompeo said.
The comments were telling. Asean as a group has largely refrained from criticising China for its actions in the South China Sea. China has insisted it will deal with territorial disputes with Southeast Asian nations on a bilateral basis, not through Asean. And its economic support of Cambodia and Laos in particular gives it sway over those nations in Asean, which relies on consensus.
Still, “one unique feature of the Mekong River is that its geographic span reflects the region’s geopolitical hierarchy: a powerful China at the headwaters, smaller less developed nations downstream,” said Sebastian Strangio, a Thailand-based researcher who is writing a book on the impact of China’s influence in Southeast Asia.
“You can already see this in the extreme reluctance of downstream nations to say anything critical about China’s exploitation of the upper reaches of the Mekong,” he said, referring to the huge projects in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar that are bankrolled by China.
Matt Busch, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute’s East Asia programme, concurs with Mr Strangio.
“With the existing governance structures for the Mekong no longer functioning in a collective and effective fashion, we will probably witness more states acting alone to secure what they perceive as their shortterm interests.”