China, US angle for Mekong influence
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - The Mekong River is steadily emerging as a testing ground for China's
public diplomacy. Beijing, it appears, wants to reach out to its southern
neighbors who share the river more as a friendly giant than an imposing bully.
An unprecedented move to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding two of four
Chinese built dams on the upper stretches of the river that snakes through
southern China is only the latest in a diplomatic shift towards more openness
that has been taking shape since mid-March.
On June 7, senior government officials from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and
Vietnam were offered their first glimpse of the newly
built Xiaowan dam and the older Jinghong dam as part of a fact-finding tour. It
was a groundbreaking journey into the mountainous terrain of China's Yunnan
province that had until this month been forbidden territory to officials from
the Mekong River Basin countries.
The welcome mat was rolled out by Beijing in early April during the first
summit of the Mekong River countries, including Myanmar, in addition to the
four basin countries and China. That summit, held in the Thai resort town of
Hua Hin, was to mark the 15th anniversary of the 1995 Mekong Agreement, which
paved the way for the creation of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an
inter-governmental body of the four lower Mekong countries tasked to manage and
develop the basin area.
"The Chinese government indicated at the summit that they would like to be more
open with governments in the lower Mekong countries," said MRC spokesman Damian
Kean from his headquarters in Vientiane. "It was keen to address the concerns
of the lower basin countries."
Some saw a noticeable turning point for China in March as it started to shed
its secretive policies about its designs on the Mekong River, which begins its
4,660-kilometer long journey from the Tibetan plateau, heads through Yunnan,
then passes Myanmar before snaking its way through the basin to empty out into
the South China Sea in southern Vietnam.
What prompted this move, some suggest, was the withering criticism China's four
completed dams and plans for several more came under as the river dried up
earlier this year, hitting lows not seen in the past 50 years in some areas of
the basin. There are approximately 60 million people living in the basin, many
of whom depend on fishing in the Mekong for their livelihoods.
Significantly, Beijing offered its olive branch through Thailand, the Southeast
Asian country where most of the anti-dam criticism by environmental and
grassroots activists emerged. Groups like Save the Mekong Coalition, a
Bangkok-based network, had earlier declared that the "changes to the Mekong
River's daily hydrology and sediment load since the early 1990s have already
been linked to the operation of the [Chinese] dam cascade".
Chen Dehai, a diplomat from China's embassy in Bangkok, held a press conference
in March that broke Beijing's silence about the dams, which has prevailed since
the Manwan, the first of the China's dams built on the upper Mekong, came on
line in 1992.
The Chinese dams were not the reason for the record drop in the Mekong's water
level during this year's dry season, Chen told reporters. "The average annual
runoff volume of the Lancang River at the outbound point [of China] is
approximately 64 billion cubic meters, accounting for only 13.5 percent of the
Mekong's run off volume at the [South China] sea outlet," he said, using the
Chinese name for the Mekong.
Another Chinese diplomat echoed this view during a rare appearance at a
discussion about the Mekong held on April 1 at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn
University. Yao Wen, the first secretary to the Chinese mission in Bangkok,
said the Xiaowan, the largest of the dams, had begun to impound water since
July 2009, but that such operations had stopped at the beginning of the dry
season.
During his visit to Bangkok in March, Hu Zhengyue, China's assistant foreign
minister, reportedly offered reassuring words of friendship to its Mekong
neighbors. "China would not do anything to damage mutual interest with
neighboring countries in the Mekong," Hu was reported to have told Thai Prime
Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
"China has realized that its past approach of avoiding public engagement and
public diplomacy with the lower Mekong countries has not worked," said Carl
Middleton, Mekong program coordinator for International Rivers, a US-based
environmental lobby.
Yet what seems lacking so far is recognition by Beijing of its past errors in
building four dams without consulting communities in the lower Mekong,
Middleton said. "People need to be compensated for the past errors."
The information about the dams that China is now willing to share with the
lower Mekong countries and the MRC should be given to the communities in the
lower Mekong, he added. "China needs to recognize that the Mekong is a shared
river if regional peace and prosperity is to be achieved."
Achieving such regional peace is in Beijing's interest for geopolitical
reasons, say analysts, in the wake of new interest shown by the US government
to help manage and develop the Mekong river, which Washington arguably lost
interest in soon after its defeat during the US war in Vietnam.
In mid-May, the MRC and the Mississippi River Commission inked their first deal
for river management cooperation, confirming a plan that was unveiled last July
by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the first-ever US-Lower Mekong
Ministerial Meeting in the southern Thai resort of Phuket.
During that visit, Clinton also signed the Treaty of Amity, a regional security
deal that Beijing had already signed in 2003. "China's public diplomacy to
reach out to the lower Mekong countries is a direct response to the US signing
the Treaty of Amity last year," said Kavi Chongkittavorn, a columnist on
regional affairs for The Nation, an English-language daily in Thailand.
"Beijing lost the advantage it had and cannot afford to have a negative image
in the region."
(Inter Press Service with editing by Asia Times Online)
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