News Analysis
TRIN-GYI-PHO-NYA, Vol. 3, No. 3
While most of us were celebrating the Dalai Lama’s 70th birthday, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao met with prime ministers from mainland southeast Asia in the city of Kunming for a summit meeting of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), an economic integration initiative started by the Asian Development Bank in 1992. The GMS initiative aims to promote the integration of the economies of the Mekong River’s five downstream states (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) and a province of People’s Republic of China, Yunnan. Since Tibetan areas in Kham such as Kongzirawa and Balung (Weixi in Chinese), Dechen (Deqin) and Gyalthang (Zhongdian) are situated in Yunnan Province, Khampas living in Yunnan Province are also subject to the agreements signed under GMS auspices.
Regional political-economic rapprochement among Southeast Asian countries could be a welcome change for most stakeholders, but the process by which the leaders are making decisions about the future of the Mekong region is disturbing at best. The Kunming meeting, like the previous GMS summit meetings, did not include the expertise of civil society groups, let alone the voices of disenfranchised and indigenous peoples living along the river, most of whom have no knowledge that leaders with statist agendas are sculpting the future of their livelihoods.
Two people’s meetings were held before the summit, one in Thailand and one in Laos, focusing on controversial issues such as China’s hydro-electric dams in the upper Mekong River and the blasting of reefs to allow navigation of larger commercial vessels. However, these issues were not on the summit’s agenda, which was designed towards agreement-signing ceremonies regarding cross-border transportation, electric-power trade, information technology and animal epidemics.
The central concerns and vision articulated by civil society leaders are thus a world apart from those of the state representatives of the GMS. “Economics is not the only concern. We also have to care for culture and the environment,” said Niwat Roykaew, of Rak Chiang Khong, a Thai conservation group. The Mekong People’s Council, comprising about a dozen independent organizations from Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and China, as well as local representatives, issued a call to the governments and foreign funders to suspend all GMS development projects “until the public views are included.” They demanded that the Asian Development Bank “turn their assistance to small-scale, sustainable projects,” clearly concerned about the social and ecological implications of the GMS large-scale development approach.
One such project is the Mekong Power Grid, which allows the sale of electricity from controversial large dams in China, Burma and Laos to energy-hungry Thai and Vietnamese cities through the grid. If unchecked, the bureaucratic and economic needs of this power grid are bound to encourage construction of more dams upstream, like the four proposed dams in Dechen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture—the Liutongsiang, Jiabi, Wunenglong, and Tuoba projects—that are yet to be formally approved by China.
