Beijing to dominate Mekong region summit

The third summit of the greater Mekong sub-region countries — Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam — started Sunday in Vientiane with meetings by a regional youth group and businessmen, Radio Laos reported in a broadcast monitored in Bangkok.

Khamthan Suthienamtha, secretary general of the Youth Union of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, opened the meeting with the prediction that the summit would help “meet the strategic targets of the younger generation in all six countries.”

“The visiting leaders met with the youth and business leaders in the afternoon,” Lao Foreign Ministry spokesman Yong Chanthalangsy said.

“The most important document expected to come out of this summit will be the Vientiane Declaration and the Vientiane Plan of Action for the Mekong,” Yong said in a telephone interview with dpa on Sunday.

Several bilateral agreements were signed Sunday between the visiting leaders and their Lao counterparts.

And when the six Mekong country premiers meet, China will be the elephant in the room, having lavished highways and sports stadiums on its neighbors and expanded its search for resources.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived Saturday to attend the summit and met with Lao President Choummaly Saygnasone Sunday morning to discuss bilateral relations.

Booming China is fast emerging as the biggest economic patron of Laos, host of a two-day Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) summit, as well as of Cambodia and Myanmar, and it is a formidable force in Thailand and Vietnam.

Beijing has expanded its search for energy, minerals and markets as far as Africa and South America, but it has also pulled its smaller Southeast Asian neighbors firmly into its orbit with aid, trade and investment.

While China’s economic ties with GMS members Thailand and Vietnam still compete with economic powers like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, they dominate in military-ruled Myanmar and in poverty-stricken Cambodia and Laos.

Chinese road crews are helping build transnational highways, such as a link between Bangkok and the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan, that are transforming the region of more than 266 million people under a scheme promoted by the Asian Development Bank.

Traders from China have fanned out across the region, and their cheap produce and consumer goods — from textiles and plastic wares to mopeds and TVs — are now sold in the remotest Mekong jungle backwaters.

He Yafei, China’s assistant foreign minister, said last Wednesday that the GMS — which starts with a dinner on Sunday followed by the meet on Monday — aims “to enhance economic links, to eliminate poverty and promote development”.

China would use the summit to “put forward a new cooperation initiative that will include railway, power, information superhighway and other infrastructure development projects” and facilitate environmental protection, he said.

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