September 27,
2017
BANGKOK — Thirty
million people depend for a living on the Mekong, the great Asian river that
runs through Southeast Asia from its origins in the snowfields of Tibet to its
end in the delta region of Vietnam, where it fertilizes one of the world’s
richest agricultural areas. It’s the greatest freshwater fishery on the planet,
second only to the Amazon in its riparian biodiversity. If you control its
waters, then you control much of the economy of Southeast Asia.
In meetings with
the other Mekong states — Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam —
China talks
about a “community of shared future.” But as China’s economy and its
ambitions have both expanded, so have its goals for the Mekong. Beijing has
expanded its control of the waters by building new hydroelectric dams and by
what some experts call hydrodiplomacy, creating and financing a new governing
body on the river that rivals a former Western-supported group. For critics, control
of the waterway is a key move in China’s attempt to establish itself as a
regional hegemon; for locals by the river, it’s also a potential environmental
and economic disaster. China’s latest move has been to press downstream
countries for what’s euphemistically called “navigation channel improvement,”
which means allowing its engineers to dynamite rocks and small islands in the
Mekong so that bigger ships can make the journey all the way from Yunnan to
Luang Prabang and, eventually, to the South China Sea.
This has not gone
unnoticed, especially in Thailand, where grassroots organizations have joined
with environmentalists to protest Chinese activities on the river. But Chinese
plans and projects are not the only issue. Environmental protests have widened
their scope as some of the downriver countries, including Laos, Cambodia, and
Thailand itself, are building their own gigantic hydroelectric dams, financed
by consortiums of Southeast Asian banks. The Chinese dams alone, taken
together, produce some 15,000 MW of electrical power, enough to power
a city of between 1 million and 2 million people.
But according to numerous
studies, these projects — added to the dams already built and planned for
downstream — will complete the transformation of the river, turning it
essentially into a series of canals and lakes good for electrical generation
and shipping but, critics say, ruinous for fish, fishermen, and farmers along
its banks.
“It is the people
upstream that get the benefits of controlling the water,” Apisom Intralawan, a
scholar at the Institute for the Study of Natural Resources and Environmental
Management in the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai, said. “The downstream
people are losers.… We get electricity, but we lose fisheries, and if you
examine the consequences, the fishery loss is greater than the electricity
gain.”
A Chinese vessel on Mekong the near the China-Laos border.
(FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)
In July, I went
to the Thai port town of Chiang Khong on the south bank of the Mekong, a few
hundred yards from Laos, whose green hills, dotted with sheds and houses, are
visible on the other side. The summer river flows in yellow-tinted brown,
branches, leaves, and plastic bottles moving downstream with the swift current,
the banks thick with wild banana trees and river palms. Narrow wooden boats
drift languidly, dragging fishing nets. There are small ports, concrete ramps
leading into the water, where fruit and vegetables are offloaded by hand from
pickup trucks and vans and put onto small freight boats that cross the river to
Laos.
Below the town,
right on the river, are some wood huts with thatched roofs and a sign in
English that reads, “Justice for the Mekong River and Its People.” This is part
of the Chiang Khong Conservation Group, led by a former local schoolteacher named
Niwat Roykaew. Twenty years ago, he told me, local people began noticing
changes in the river, especially in the usual water levels, though it took some
time for him and his colleagues in the nascent organization to understand the
cause — dams being built by China in southwestern Yunnan province. “Where the
water should have been high, it was low,” he said, “And where it should have
been low, it was high.”
To date, six big
dams have been completed on the Chinese portion of the Mekong, known there as
the Lancang Jiang, and the downriver complaints are many — destruction of a
freshwater seaweed called gai that is harvested by local people and sold in the
market, damage to breeding grounds, and water levels that swing from sudden
floods to trickles that leave local boats scraping the bottom. But there isn’t
much that environmentalists can do about the upriver dams, constructed
unilaterally and without consultations or negotiations with the downriver
countries. That’s why local attention has focused on a different issue: the
Chinese request, repeatedly made over the years, to dynamite some 15 rock
formations and tiny islets in order to clear the waters for boats weighing up
to 500 tons, which is a ship about 100 meters in length, nearly twice the size
of any vessel that can navigate the Mekong now.
This May, three
Chinese survey boats appeared on the river at Khon Phi Luong, a stretch of the
Mekong upriver from Chiang Khong. China has already carried out an initial
phase of its navigation improvement scheme, clearing obstacles in Myanmar, so
Khon Phi Luong, a mile-long stretch of rapids between the verdant hills of
Thailand and Laos, is the only remaining obstacle to ships of 500 tons between
Yunnan and Luang Prabang.
The Chinese
boats, which carried engineers and survey equipment, were met with a small
flotilla of Thai fishing boats, with protesters holding up signs reading “Save
the Mekong” and “Stop Rock Blasting.” Mindful of this opposition, the Thai
government, while it allowed the Chinese engineers to survey the river, has not
given the go-ahead for the actual blasting.
“China asks again
and again,” a Chiang Khong storekeeper who was on the protest flotilla told me.
“But we’ll resist every time.” The protests may play a role, but the Thai
military is also said to be concerned about clearing the channel at Khon Phi
Luong, because doing so would change the official border line between Laos and
Thailand to the latter’s disadvantage.
Meanwhile, the
six dams that China has already built on what it calls the Lancang Jiang are
only the beginning. According to International Rivers, an NGO with offices in
Thailand, China plans a total of 28
dams in Yunnan province. In addition, there are 11 large dams already under
construction or in planning stages on the lower Mekong, plus 30 on its
tributaries.
In most cases,
required environmental impact studies have been done on these dams, but many of
them, paid for by the governments involved, are faulted by scholars
and environmentalist
groups for various reasons — from underestimating the value of the fish
catch that will be lost to overestimating the usefulness of ladders that the
migrating fish will need to get past the dams. Sediment will be trapped in the
upriver dams, depriving the downriver areas of essential nutrients for fish and
plants.
“Chinese experts
have told me, ‘We will give you more clear water in the dry season,’ but
actually we don’t need it,” Pienporn Deetes, the Thailand director of
International Rivers, told me. “The sediment is captured by the dams upstream.
The entire cycle has already collapsed.”
Thailand’s
environmental movement appears to have some public support, but in a country
that has been under the thumb of a military junta for the past three years, and
where political gatherings of more than five people are banned, it has little
political power. The junta, eager to promote economic development, has welcomed
close relations with China as it has distanced itself from Washington,
Thailand’s closest ally since the end of World War II. And while some Thais are
alarmed at the expansion of China’s presence in the country, the junta clearly
appreciates that, unlike the United States, Beijing has no issues with the
military’s 2014 coup against a democratic government or its suspension of civil
liberties.
“We are not your
colony,” Panitan Wattanayagorn, an American-educated advisor to Thailand’s
deputy prime minister of security, told me in an interview in Bangkok. He was
expressing the resentment he said Thais feel about American and European
criticisms and of a scaling down of U.S. military aid to Thailand, which
contrasts with China’s policy of noninterference. Closer ties have involved the
first-ever Thai purchase of arms from China — a submarine costing
more than $390 million (with an option to buy two more at what Thai officials
describe as a favorable price) — and $59 million worth of armored
personnel carriers.
Chinese
investment in Thailand, as well as in neighboring Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia,
has rapidly increased. There are ongoing talks with China about its Belt and
Road Initiative, an increasingly nebulous and all-encompassing plan that
started as a mass expansion of Eurasian ties. New roads are being built from
Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, to Thailand via Laos and over the Thai-Lao
Friendship Bridge, just a few miles downriver from Chiang Khong. Ground has
been broken for a high-speed rail link connecting Kunming with Bangkok, then
heading farther south all the way to Singapore.
China’s growing
presence is natural and normal in many ways, given the country’s proximity and
its wealth, but Beijing’s opaque politics and its naked ambition to become the
dominant power in Asia also generate nervousness and suspicion. “We are
concerned about China’s activities in the South China Sea and on the Mekong,”
Panitan said. The Thai government has not signed on to the very expensive
high-speed train — except for one small stretch — and some Thai economists
question whether these grand projects will bring gains to the country.
“China will get
the benefit,” Saowaruj Rattanakhamfu, a senior economist at the Thailand
Development Research Institute in Bangkok, told me. “Its exports will help the
development of southern China,” she said, “but I study cross-border trade, and
from that point of view, I don’t think Thailand will get much benefit.”
Ota Khami, 55, stands where his home use to be before it was
bulldozed to make way for the Sesan 2 dam in Stung Treng, Cambodia.
(JASON
SOUTH/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)
Thailand has few
options when it comes to dealing with China’s plans for the Mekong, mainly
because it has no power to prevent China from doing what it wants where the
river runs through its territory. But China has also been carrying out what
Carl Middleton, the former Mekong program director at International Rivers,
calls “hydrodiplomacy,” creating a new multinational organization of the Mekong
countries. Since the 1950s, the main such group has been the Mekong River
Commission (MRC), which, encouraged by organizations like the World Bank and
largely supported by the United States and Japan, urged its members to explore
hydropower as a key ingredient in their economic development. China was never a
member of the MRC, which makes the new group it has formed, known as the
Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, the first organization to include all six Mekong
countries. Its first meeting, held in China in March last year, was hailed by
China’s press as a
major new step in regional cooperation.
It is not clear
exactly what the new mechanism will do, but it seems similar to other
multilateral bodies created by China — like the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank — which allow Beijing far greater power to take initiatives and to set
rules than it does in older, Western-dominated institutions and through which
it can work to blunt the grassroots and environmental opposition that its
ambitions often generate.
China, as
Middleton puts it, considers Southeast Asia to be its backyard, a place where
it should have paramount influence, and one way it uses that influence is to
incorporate the Mekong into its larger development plan. This involves using
hydroelectricity to feed the industries of its southeastern coast and to use
the revenues to reduce poverty in Yunnan. Its neighbors’ concerns barely
infringe on these plans — this is a country, after all, that was happy to
displace millions of its own people to build the Three Gorges Dam.
Given China’s
ambitions, organizations like the Chiang Khong Conservation Group and others
like it clearly face an uphill struggle. China and the downriver governments
both envision a future for the Mekong in which it will be primarily a source of
energy, thus stripped of its other uses and possibilities.
“If the trend
continues,” Deetes told me, showing me brochures and studies on the
transformation of the Mekong that has taken place already, “I don’t think we
can stop anything.”
Top photo credit:
CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP/Getty Images
The reporting for
this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Richard Bernstein, a former foreign correspondent in
Asia and Europe for Time and The New York Times, is the author of China 1945:
Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment