Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. He emphasized again that the project, including its financial support through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund, is about “openness, development and cooperation… on the basis of equality and mutual benefit,” and confirmed that China’s neighboring countries are the main partners in this initiative and will be the first to benefit from it (Xi, 2015, p. 11). Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that, among China’s neighboring ASEAN countries, Singapore plays the most significant role in various ways. These include the geo-political position of Singapore at the crossroads in the “maritime silk road” scheme of the BRI in the Asia-Pacific region and, simultaneously, its geo-economical position as an end destination of the “silk road economic belt” complex connecting Southern provinces of China, via roads and railway links through many Mainland ASEAN countries, with global economic activities.
2.6.Mainland ASEAN in China’s New Era: “One Belt, One Road, One River?”
Mainland ASEAN, consisting of Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia (the peninsular part), Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, is crucially situated at the focal point of China’s connectivity schemes linking with its southern and western provinces. It is impossible to deal with all the relevant areas, dimensions, and scopes here. Our discussion focuses only on the Mekong River sub-region, which nonetheless represents various key issues.
The Mekong River, which flows through three provinces of China, running across Myanmar, Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, is around 4,909 kilometers in length and is the 10th largest river in the world (Mekong River Commission, n.d.). The Mekong River Basin includes substantial areas of Laos, Thailand, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar (listed in order of the size of the basin area in respective countries). Covering an area of 795,000 square kilometers, it ranks 21st among river basins worldwide. Its area in Indochina amounts to 40% of the total area of Mainland ASEAN riparian countries, while its area in China covers only 2% of the whole country (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011). The river is described as consisting of two parts, i.e. the upper Mekong, which refers to its origin and passage in China and is called “Lancang” in Chinese, and the lower Mekong, which refers to its passage through Mainland ASEAN countries which is called “Mekong” proper. According to the China-based Lancang–Mekong Cooperation Framework (to be discussed below), this particular geographical and economic setting “(feeds) altogether 360 million people” (including the population in the three Chinese provinces along the Lancang); and all the riparian countries of the Mekong “are home to 230 million people and boast a combined GDP of over US$600 billion and an average annual growth rate of nearly 7%” (Lancang–Mekong Cooperation, 2017b). As a sub-region, the Mekong River Basin constitutes a major ecosystem and has the potential for development and connectivity. It is of note that, when we speak of Mainland ASEAN as an entity, the Mekong area and linkages often represent a salient unit of their own (whether geographical, geo-political, or geo-economical) that involve half of the ASEAN member countries.
Unsurprisingly, the sub-region has been a major focus of the attempts at international cooperation, resulting in many multilateral and multifaceted mechanisms. The Mekong Committee was initially established under a statute endorsed by the United Nations in 1957 and was joined by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. The scope of the project of the Committee is said to be “the largest single development project the UN had ever undertaken” at that time (Mekong River Commission, n.d.). Later on, in 1977, due to domestic political situations, Cambodia left the organization, which was then succeeded by the Interim Mekong Committee consisting of the other three countries. The legacy of both committees in terms of information, linkage, and experience was then transferred to their successor, namely, the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which was set up on April 5, 1995 in Chiang Rai, Thailand, under the Agreement on Cooperation for Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin (the Mekong Agreement) signed by Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam. The MRC has been funded by and has involvement of the governments of the member countries and others, as well as various international financial and development agencies. Overall, however, it may be said to be funded more by Western donors rather than the member countries themselves (Middleton & Allouche, 2016). China and Myanmar have also been dialogue partners of the organization since 1996 (Mekong River Commission, n.d.).
Another major multilateral cooperation body has been the Greater Mekong Sub-region Cooperation Program (GMS), which was established in 1992 under the leading coordination and support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Six member nations of the GMS include all five ASEAN riparian countries of the Mekong and China, i.e. Yunnan Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in particular, (Greater Mekong Sub-region, n.d.). The GMS cooperation framework has strategically focused on conventional infrastructure and multi-sector investments “designed to foster economic corridor development” and its subsequent schemes (Greater Mekong Sub-region, n.d.). While China has been quite disengaged in MRC, it is under GMS framework that she has shown strong enthusiasm in cooperation on transport and energy (Biba, 2018).
With regard to Mainland ASEAN and China, the most important sub-regional mechanism is obviously the Lancang–Mekong Cooperation (LMC). At first, Thailand took the initiative to arrange an international conference among all six riparian countries of the Lancang River and Mekong River in November 2012 with the objective of cooperating in handling the “many challenges such as natural disasters and security concerns,” which are lacking in other multilateral mechanisms (The Nation, 2012). Along with other nations, China responded positively to the initiative. Furthermore, during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Thailand in October 2013, a joint press statement was issued with an article confirming that “the Chinese side expressed its support for Thailand’s initiative to host the International Conference on Sustainable Development of Lancang–Mekong River Sub-region” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Thailand, 2013). In November 2014, at the 17th ASEAN–China Summit, it was reported that Li Keqiang “proposed the establishment of the Lancang–Mekong Framework, which was warmly welcomed by the five Mekong River countries” (Lancang–Mekong Cooperation, 2017b).
Then on March 23, 2016 in Sanya city of China’s Hainan province (and island), China hosted the first LMC Leaders’ Meeting, with “Shared river, Shared future” as its theme, issuing the Sanya Declaration affirming the vision “For a Community of Shared Future of Peace and Prosperity among Lancang–Mekong Countries,” which will be “an example of a new form of international relations featuring win–win cooperation” (Lancang–Mekong Cooperation, 2017b). The declaration details “three cooperation pillars” consisting of “(1) political and security issues, (2) economic and sustainable development, and (3) social, cultural and people-to-people exchanges,” and “five priority areas during the initial stage of the LMC” including “connectivity, production capacity, cross-border economic cooperation, water resources, agriculture and poverty reduction” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2016). These LMC visions and schemes entitled “3+5 Cooperation Framework” may be said to be aspiring and encompassing indeed (see Lancang–Mekong Cooperation, 2017a). LMC has become a major framework of cooperation among Mekong riparian countries in a comprehensive way, with China playing a leading role. Yet, it is stated clearly in the declaration that the LMC framework will be coordinated and executed on the basis of a “government-guided, multiple-participation, and project-oriented model” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2016). As noted by a number of scholars, LMC should not be understood, at least in its current settings, as an international institution or organization cooperating within a river basin, unlike the MRC, which has codified specified rules and regulations derived from the UN Watercourses Convention (Biba, 2018, p. 634; Middleton & Allouche, 2016, p. 113).
The “Second LMC Leaders’ Meeting” was held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on January 10, 2018, resulting in the endorsement of the LMC Five-Year Plan of Action (2018–2022) (Mu, 2018). The plan began with a number of shared development goals that are to be accomplished by “synergizing China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 as well as the Master
