Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009–January 2010, pp. 147–160
Order a copy of the issue here
<First 500 words>
Less than two decades after the end of a long and bloody conflict, a new kind of danger is looming over the six countries that share the watershed of the 4,880-kilometre-long Mekong – a river that at the height of the conflict earned the name ‘River of Terror and Hope’. Peace has brought a new peril to more than 60 million people (mostly in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) reliant on traditional farming and fishing, and ultimately to the stability and peace of the Mekong region as a whole. This time, however, the danger is not about ideology or territory, but water: who controls it, how it should be used, and for whose benefit. China’s economic development and geopolitical objectives pose the most important, but by no means the only, threat to human security and regional stability. To varying degrees the former war-torn countries are also pursuing short-sighted, environmentally unsustainable development policies, sometimes in conjunction with Chinese ambitions for regional economic integration.
The 795,000km2 Mekong basin, about the size of the Danube basin in central and eastern Europe, comprises a large portion of five Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar) and China’s Yunnan Province. The river rises in the Tibetan Plateau and plunges some 4,000m through the high gorges of Yunnan Province before slowing and broadening in the Golden Triangle area where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand converge. The river forms much of the Laos–Thailand border before bifurcating Cambodia, dividing into nine branches that form Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and emptying into the South China Sea.
The Mekong is the 12th-longest river in the world, with the 8th-largest annual discharge. But its most important characteristic, ecologically and sociologically, The most important ecological and sociological characteristic of the Mekong is not its length, discharge or the area that it drains, but the ratio of 30 or more between its wet and dry season flows. Seasonal extremes are moderated by Cambodia’s Tonle Sap (‘Great Lake’) lake–river system that connects to the Mekong at Phnom Penh. As the wet-season flood builds, the river reverses direction and the lake expands several-fold, becoming a flood buffer and giant seasonal nursery for migratory fish and other aquatic life. For about three months after the floods subside the lake empties back into the Mekong, bringing with it the world’s richest concentration of freshwater migratory fish both in numbers and species, and providing part of the Mekong Delta enough water to produce a third rice harvest.
The buffering role of Tonle Sap and the importance of its seasonal wetlands led to a 1995 treaty signed by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam creating the Mekong River Commission. The commission commits the countries to maintain an ‘acceptable natural reverse flow’ into Tonle Sap. A cascade of eight or more massive hydropower dams under construction in Yunnan and 11 or more dams proposed for the mainstream and its tributaries by Laos and Cambodia raise serious questions about the future viability of the buffer.
Beijing has put great...
Get full article here
Richard Cronin is a Senior Associate and Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson Center in Washington DC. He is the co-producer of a documentary video ‘Mekong Tipping Point’ and co-editor (with Amit Pandya) of Exploiting Natural Resources: Growth, Instability, and Conflict in the Middle East and Asia (Stimson Center, 2009).
Related Articles
China's Democratised Foreign Policy by Denny Roy (February–March 2009)
The Rise and Fall of Resource Nationalism by Ian Bremmer and Robert Johnston (February–March 2009)
Sources and Limits of Chinese 'Soft Power' by Bates Gill and Yanzhong Huang (Summer 2006)
China's Energy Security: Domestic and International Issues by Zha Daojiong (Spring 2006)
Asia's Continuing Crisis by William H. Overholt (Spring 2002)
The Asian Energy Predicament by Robert Manning (Autumn 2000)
China's Military Posture and the New Ecomonic Geopolitics by Evan A. Feigenbaum (Summer 1999)
