Chapter Two: The Mekong Region

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, China's growing economic and political strength has been accompanied by adept diplomacy and active promotion of regional cooperation, institutions and integration. Southeast Asian states and China engage in ‘strategic regionalism’: they seek regional membership for regime legitimation and collective bargaining; and regional integration to enhance economic development, regarded as essential for ensuring national and regime security. Sino-Southeast Asian regionalism is exemplified by the development plans for the Mekong River basin, where ambitious projects for building regional infrastructural linkages and trade contribute to mediating the security concerns of the Mekong countries. However, Mekong regionalism also generates new insecurities. Developing the resources of the Mekong has led to serious challenges in terms of governance, distribution and economic ‘externalities’. Resource-allocation and exploitation conflicts occur most obviously within the realm of water projects, especially hydropower development programmes. While such disputes are not likely to erupt into armed conflict because of the power asymmetry between China and the lower Mekong states, they exacerbate Southeast Asian concerns about China's rise and undermine Chinese rhetoric about peaceful development. But the negative security consequences of developing the Mekong are also due to the shared economic imperative, and the Southeast Asian states' own difficulties with collective action due to existing intramural conflicts.

Notes

¹A river basin is defined in hydrological terms as the catchment area or watershed of the river itself, including tributary and distributary streams, and the immediately surrounding land.

²Myanmar is a very minor riparian state, and for this reason is not discussed at any length in this paper.

³The monsoon causes major differences in flow levels in the Mekong lowlands, and the Tonlé Sap system naturally evens out this anomaly: in the dry season, the Tonlé Sap River drains the Great Lake towards the Mekong, supplementing low flows; in the wet season, rather than flooding its banks, the Mekong reverses its flow up the Tonlé Sap to fill the Great Lake and its surrounding swamp forests. See V.R. Pantulu, ‘Fish of the Lower Mekong Basin’, in B.R. Davies and K.F. Walker (eds), The Ecology of River Systems (Dordrecht: W. Junk, 1986).

⁴Interim Mekong Committee Secretariat (IMCS), Fisheries in the Lower Mekong Basin (Bangkok: IMCS, 1992); ‘In the Reaches of the Dragon’, The Nation (Thailand), 8 March 1996.

⁵Shi Lishan, ‘On Developing China's Hydropower Resources and Transmitting Electricity from East to West’, in Investment in China (Beijing: State Development Planning Commission, 2000).

⁶This is the Kong-Chi-Mun project. See Biwater, Kingdom of Thailand: Green E-Sarn: Investigation and Preparation of a Water Resource Development Programme for Northeast Thailand (Dorking: Biwater House, 1987); Prachoom Chomchai, The United States, the Mekong Committee and Thailand: A Study of American Multilateral and Bilateral Assistance to North-east Thailand Since the 1950s (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Institute of Asian Studies, 1994), pp. 91–93.

⁷‘RID Warns of Failure To Implement Project’, The Nation, 21 February 1997; ‘B50bn Water Diversion Project is to be Revived: Kok-Ing-Nan Revival Linked to Dam Delay’, Bangkok Post, 21 February 1997. The Kok-Ing-Nan project involves costly and complex engineering, and is dogged by controversy over its environmental impact.

⁸Kristina Egan, ‘From Megawatts to Negawatts: Demand Side Management in Thailand’, Watershed, vol. 2, no. 2, November 1996–February 1997, pp. 54–56; ‘Study Planned for Two Dams’, Bangkok Post, 4 October 2005; ‘Project To Develop Mekong Basin will be Proposed to Roving Cabinet on Jan 10’, Thai National News Bureau, 8 January 2006.

⁹J. Odendall and E. Torrell, The Mighty Mekong Mystery: A Study on the Problems and Possibilities of Natural Resources Utilization in the Mekong River Basin (Stockholm: Area Forecasting Institute, 1997), pp. 120–23.

¹⁰The Mekong River Commission Secretariat (MRCS) puts Cambodia's Mekong hydropower potential at about 2,200 mW. See Chuong Phanrajsavong and D.L. Nguyen, ‘The Lower Mekong Basin: Hydropower Potential and Development Opportunities’, MRCS Hydropower Unit paper presented to the conference ‘Hydropower into the Next Century’, Barcelona, 5–8 June 1995, p. 5.

¹¹‘Cambodian Watershed’, The Nation, 1 November 1996.

¹²For a good discussion, see Fiona Miller, ‘Environmental Threats to the Mekong Delta’, Watershed, 17 February 2000, available at http://www.probeinternational.org/probeint/Mekong/articles/000217b.html.

¹³St John, Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia, pp. 184–5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Goh

Dr Evelyn Goh is University Lecturer in International Relations and Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford. Her research interests are Asian security, US–China relations, US foreign policy, and international relations theory. She has a long-standing academic interest in environment and development issues, and has studied the geopolitics of the Mekong region for ten years.