Rivers of Iron

Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia

David M. Lampton, Selina Ho, Cheng-Chwee Kuik

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520976160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

What China's infamous railway initiative can teach us about global dominance. In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what would come to be known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a global development strategy involving infrastructure projects and associated financing throughout the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. While the Chinese government has framed the plan as one promoting transnational connectivity, critics and security experts see it as part of a larger strategy to achieve global dominance. Rivers of Iron examines one aspect of President Xi Jinping's "New Era" China's effort to create an intercountry railway system connecting China and its seven Southeast Asian neighbors (Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This book illuminates the political strengths and weaknesses of the plan, as well as the capacity of the impacted countries to resist, shape, and even take advantage of China's wide-reaching actions. Using frameworks from the fields of international relations and comparative politics, the authors of Rivers of Iron seek to explain how domestic politics in these eight Asian nations shaped their varying external responses and behaviors. How does China wield power using infrastructure? Do smaller states have agency? How should we understand the role of infrastructure in broader development? Does industrial policy work? And crucially, how should competing global powers respond?

CHAPTER 1

Chinese Power Is as Chinese Power Does

Rivers of Iron tells the story of China’s unfolding role in realizing the regionwide dream of building an intercountry railroad system connecting Southwest China and its seven Southeast Asian neighbors. This system is gradually taking shape with construction of Chinese-backed projects underway in several of the countries. Progress is being made. Nonetheless, while the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is strong, it is not a goliath bestriding the world, even in this region where China looms over its small and medium-size neighbors.

This book illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of China’s demonstration of power during President Xi Jinping’s self-styled “New Era” as well as the capacity of its smaller neighbors to resist, shape, and at times even take advantage of China’s actions. Utilizing frameworks from the fields of international relations and comparative politics, this book seeks to explain how domestic politics in all eight of the involved nations affects their external behavior. Finally, Rivers of Iron addresses a fundamental development issue in what is emerging globally as a new age of infrastructure—How should we understand the role of infrastructure in development, and how do policy makers and analysts balance the long-term value and prospective gains of investments with the sometimes huge short- and medium-term costs?

In June 2017, while our multinational research team was in Laos deep in interviews, Chinese engineers and laborers, organized in multiple construction brigades, were burrowing tunnels through the impoverished country’s karst mountains and building bridges to span many of its innumerable rivers and streams to prepare the path for the construction of a relatively high-speed rail (HSR) line from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s border with China at Boten southward to Vientiane (Thanaleng) on the Mekong River, a distance of 414 kilometers.¹ This was the first segment of China’s envisioned “Central Line” running from Kunming to Bangkok, and eventually on to Singapore via Kuala Lumpur. In the most expansive vision of the evolving rail network, the Central Line would eventually be flanked by lines to the east (through Vietnam and Cambodia) and to the west (through Myanmar), with all three meeting in Bangkok and thereafter shooting down Peninsular Malaysia to Singapore. At the time we were in Laos, the border town of Boten was towered over by a golden gateway marking the entry point into China. It was a bit incongruous given the surroundings of the dusty town choked with trucks.

When we asked a senior Lao official during this 2017 visit why his country was proceeding with a project that would create a heavy national debt burden (more than half of Laos’s 2015 GDP) for its less than seven million population, indebtedness that might compromise the small nation’s sovereignty, he offered a two-part explanation. He started by saying that most thriving civilizations historically have developed along rivers or near oceans, going on to contrast that pattern with his country’s circumstance—Laos is landlocked, poor, isolated, and mountainous. While Laos is on a great river, the Mekong, it is upstream and much of its territory is not on the waterway. Moreover, the Mekong basin has large seasonal fluctuations in precipitation that dramatically impact flows and therefore river transport. Unlike every other country in continental Southeast Asia, Laos has no direct maritime access; oceans are accessible only by passing through contiguous states—China, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, or Thailand. As the official put it, in close paraphrase: China is on the coast. We need to build an Iron River. Other countries’ civilizations had rivers for transport. We have to build our own Iron River—a railroad.²

The second part of his explanation was a realistic assessment of how Laos’s circumstances shaped the decision to permit PRC companies to finance and start constructing the mammoth railroad project. The Lao PDR had the choice of refusing to move ahead with the railroad and thereby remaining a poor island in a sea of more rapidly developing neighbors, or assuming a weighty debt burden in the hope that the rail project would create new economic and social opportunities, and possibly a brighter future. Beijing, he recounted, made it clear that if Vientiane did not move ahead with the Central Line, alternate routes to both the east and west would be available. Lao leaders weighed the pros and cons of being bypassed, making what amounted to a leap of faith:

As you know we are in the middle, a landlocked country. Others have better opportunity. Cambodia has sea; they have railways. Thailand also has good infrastructure. But for us, we don’t have good infrastructure. For us, if we don’t take the steps we will lose the opportunity to connect to China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The research indicates that the closest route from China to Southeast Asia is through Laos; but if we are not ready, then we will lose the opportunity. We need to take the decision, whether we will accept or not to accept. The [Lao] government thinks [that] if we don’t accept, then we will lose the opportunity. [If we don’t accept], we won’t have any debt. But then we will [continue to] be poor like this. We must try to manage, to leverage on our location. We look at Singapore. They are surrounded by sea; no resources, no land. How do they manage to do that? With a big seaport, the ships have to pass Singapore. So we want to take the opportunity [to leverage our location]. Our biggest market is China. Through railways from Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, we can benefit from them. We can gain from trade and so on. So this is very crucial. We know there will be debt. If we don’t know how to manage the debt, it is no good. But if we know how to manage the debt, then okay.³

THE IDEA OF A PAN-ASIA RAILWAY

Rivers of Iron is about China’s endeavor to work with its seven Southeast Asian neighbors to construct what is envisioned to eventually be an integrated three-line, high- and medium-speed, standard (1.435 m) gauge, rail network running from Kunming, in Yunnan Province (southwestern China), to Singapore at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.⁴ This idea of a Pan-Asia Railway was not a Chinese idea (see chapter 2). Rather, the vision had its genesis with British and French colonialists in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, then subsequently was pushed by Japan during World War II. Thereafter, the PRC’s neighbors to the south and in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) seized the baton. Beijing has embraced this more than century-old idea and is now taking an active role to make it a reality. President Xi Jinping made a state visit to Laos in November 2017, whereupon leaders of both countries pledged to accelerate the already ongoing efforts on the first stage of the overall network.⁵ As of this writing, construction in Laos is advanced and due for completion in late 2021.

The distance from Kunming to Singapore via each of the three envisioned lines is longer than the Transcontinental Railroad’s 1,776 miles laid across the United States’ midriff from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California between 1863 and 1869. That monumental undertaking played a catalytic role in establishing America as a Pacific power. Upon completion, the United States was able to use its iron river to move its agricultural, natural, and industrial products across an enormous continent, develop its western reaches, and extend its growing power across the Pacific Ocean.

Now, 150 years later, Southeast Asia and southwestern China (Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and the Guangxi-Zhuang Autonomous Region) hope this ongoing effort can do as much for them as the Transcontinental did for America. Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” (中 国梦, Zhongguo Meng) of continental influence meshes with the dreams of China’s landlocked and isolated southwestern provinces, as well as the dreams of the seven Southeast Asian countries hoping to connect to the dynamic and growing powerhouse of China. Though anxieties exist, these shared aspirations are moving toward realization, in part, because China, for the first time, has the technology, human resources, and capital to drive the process forward. In terms of power, Beijing’s elite aspires to make China the hub of an enormous regional economic system, build their country ever more tightly and strategically into value and production chains, and connect all modes of transportation to ports around the fringes of maritime Asia for commercial and military power projection.

The American experience offers some perspective on this undertaking. In Nothing Like It in the World, his classic study on the building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, Stephen E. Ambrose cataloged the messy, corrupt, problem-plagued, violent process of its construction. Since the two railroad construction companies building the line (the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific) were paid per mile of track put down, and the two companies started from opposite ends of the route—competing to see which could lay the most rail—it is little wonder that much of the initial construction was shoddy and completed very rapidly. Given the need for congressional support in Washington, sweetheart securities deals were rampant. Land giveaways were legion. Working conditions for Chinese laborers were appalling.⁶ In The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, John Pomfret cites reports documenting “teams of Chinese bone collectors” that “followed the railroad, collecting the remains of the dead workers so they could be shipped back to China for burial among their ancestors. They were . . . ‘the caravan of the dead.’ ”⁷

Ambrose concluded his volume by saying that despite all the debates, problems, uncertainties, tragedies, shenanigans, and missteps during the Transcontinental’s creation, from the vantage point of a few decades after the project’s completion, no one doubted that the undertaking had been a transformative investment by the American public and private sectors. This undertaking represented the joint efforts of Abraham Lincoln, the northern states in the context of the Civil War and its aftermath, the US Congress, and a concatenation of oversize personalities (“robber barons”) who were visionary and unbridled entrepreneurs (Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and many others). Ambrose concluded:

Things happened as they happened. It is possible to imagine all kinds of different routes across the continent, or a better way for the government to help private industry, or maybe to have the government build and own it. But those things didn’t happen, and what did take place is grand.⁸

If the entire three trunk-line pan-Asian rail network from Kunming to Singapore is eventually completed, it would link the PRC’s seven Southeast Asian neighbors (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore) to southern China. At the Kunming junction in Yunnan, the Southeast Asian system would connect to the rest of the PRC’s 29,000 km long domestic HSR network (as of the end of 2018), slated to be 38,000 km by 2025.⁹ The Kunming hub would open up all of China to Southeast Asia, as it would simultaneously further open up continental Southeast Asia and the island state of Singapore to the PRC’s economic and human dynamism. In terms of maritime transport, China is making deals with regional states to build and expand ports that will connect with highways, industrial parks, air transport, and railroads—so the broader vision is a new intermodal network (see Map 1).

MAP 1. The Evolving Pan-Asia Railway Network Vision. The authors thank Stanford University Press for the rights to reproduce this map, which appears in David M. Lampton, “All (High-Speed Rail) Roads Lead to China,” Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, ed. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

The first component of the three-route vision to break ground is the Central Line, which has been well underway in Laos since December 2016. The Laos stretch was the first link to start construction because it was the most politically feasible of the three pathways under consideration. The segment should be operational (to the Thai border) by the end of 2021.¹⁰ In February 2018, Thailand and China started to discuss a sequence of agreements that, if consummated, would have Chinese firms contract with the Thai Transport Ministry to continue building the Central Line from Nong Khai (on the Thai side of the border with Laos) 615 km to Bangkok via Nakhon Ratchasima. If plans hold, the intention is to “complete the railway in 2023 as well as to connect it with the China-Laos railway.”¹¹ At the February 2018 meeting, Thailand and China agreed to engage in three-way talks (China, the Lao PDR, and Thailand) to facilitate a smooth hookup with the Lao line and establish protocols for customs and immigration.¹² Modest technology transfer from the PRC would be part of the deal with Bangkok. Two years prior to this meeting, in March 2016, the Thai military government announced that it would entirely finance the Thai section of the project itself. A short test rail link, a 3.5 km pilot stretch between Klang Dong and Pang Asok in Khorat’s Pak Chong District, was under construction in December 2017.¹³ Thus, the Thai portion of the Central Line is likely to materialize, with the timing, allocation of responsibilities, and myriad other details remaining to be worked out as of early 2019.

In addition, as of early 2018, at the other end of the Central Line, Singapore and Malaysia were close to soliciting tenders for the segment connecting Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Both Malaysia and Singapore initially aimed to complete construction of the Kuala Lumpur (KL)–Singapore high-speed rail by 2026, but the mid-2018 election in Malaysia caused a deferral in soliciting tenders.¹⁴ Overall, if (when) completed, the Central Line would tie together China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The two segments of the Central Line that are most uncertain are those in Thailand (south of Bangkok) and Malaysia (north of Kuala Lumpur). After the 2018 Malaysian ele...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Setting the Stage
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Chinese Power Is as Chinese Power Does
• 2. The Grand Vision
• 3. China’s Debates
• 4. Diverse Southeast Asian Responses
• 5. The Negotiating Tables: China and Southeast Asia
• 6. Project Implementation: “The Devil Is in the Details”
• 7. Geopolitics and Geoeconomics
• 8. Implications for China, Asia, and the World
• Notes
• Index