News

On 20 February, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with the press together with Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith of Laos after attending the Fifth Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Vientiane, Laos. Wang Yi said that LMC is now moving from a ...

Cambodia and China say they are now planning to sign a free-trade deal some time later this year. The move came after the duo wrapped up their first-round negotiations, which were held last month in Beijing, China. The Ministry of Economy and Finance late last week ...

The former chief of Pak Chim, a tiny village on a tributary of the Mekong River, remembers clearly the moment he knew his hamlet would be no more. It was a decade ago. A few hundred residents of Pak Chim and nearby villages along the snaking ...

Ninety-seven kilometres of rocks in Thai waters stand between Beijing and dominance over the Mekong, a mighty river that feeds millions as it threads south from the Tibetan plateau through five countries before emptying into the South China Sea. China has long wanted to dredge the ...

China has declared a 60-kilometre section of Mekong River off-limits to all types of boats indefinitely while rock blasting is undertaken to widen the channel for commercial shipping operations. China announced on Friday that operators of all types of boats should avoid entering the river from ...

The building of large dams has increasingly run into opposition in established democracies but gained momentum in autocratic states, which often tout their benefits for combating droughts and water shortages. But, as the Mekong basin illustrates, giant upstream dams can contribute to river depletion and ...

The 87th Mekong River joint patrol led by China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand started on Tuesday from Jingha Port in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The patrol, expected to last four days and three nights, will involve joint inspections and an anti-drug publicity campaign. The four countries ...

A Mekong River hydropower dam scheduled to open this month worries Vietnam because the country sits just downriver from it and would be threatened by lower water flows. Officials in Hanoi aren’t wildly protesting to the dam’s host country, Laos, however, because Vietnam knows Laos has ...

ON THE MEKONG RIVER — When the Chinese came to the village of Lat Thahae, perched on a muddy bend of a Mekong River tributary, they scrawled a Chinese character on the walls of homes, schools and Buddhist temples. No one in this isolated hamlet in ...

In June 2018, the Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy (ACMECS) held its eighth summit in Bangkok. ACMECS countries include Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand. Initially an initiative of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2003, there were few indications that the Thai government ...