China and its neighbors are ravaging the Mekong

Beijing’s formidable influence has traction because no country or authority officially controls the historic waterway.

The Mekong River is more than the sum of its nearly 3,000 miles. It’s one of the world’s most valuable waterways and has been vital to political power in Southeast Asia for centuries. As a prized strategic and financial asset, commerce and violence have marked the basin’s story. The French tried — and failed — to re-engineer the river to anchor their imperial rule. American soldiers fought fiercely in its delta, and the Khmer Rouge casually meted out atrocities not far from its banks.

Today, the river is again under siege. Dams may provide electric power to boost economic growth, but extract a terrible toll on the flora and fauna that villages have depended upon for millennia. Statecraft is colliding with major power tensions and national development goals, and the Mekong is coming off worse. Rarely, if ever, has the river’s future been more embattled. Co-operation is in short supply, just as it’s needed most.

Upheaval is everywhere you look. “Stop Dams” banners dangle from windows of a conservation office in Thailand and families lament the scarcity of once-abundant giant catfish. Boats carry tourists and cargo over previously treacherous stretches, signs its once mighty flow has been tamed. A gaudy casino decorates the Laos shoreline, while Cambodia is finalizing plans for a Suez-style canal to be constructed with Chinese assistance.

Beijing’s influence here is formidable. Its rapid industrialization and urbanization over the past several decades demanded commodities easily obtainable from the river system, such as electricity, water, sand and timber. A fifth of the river winds through China, while dams upstream there have reordered life far beyond its borders. The country has fostered influence through infrastructure development projects under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative. Cars made by Shenzhen-based BYD Co. are a fixture on Southeast Asia’s roads and the Chinese bubble-tea chains ubiquitous in financial centers like Singapore and Hong Kong are popping up. Seldom has a single power wielded this much clout in the region.

The Mekong’s Problems Start in China

The US, which sent around 58,000 servicemen to their deaths during the Vietnam War, can still make a difference — if it desires. But Washington appears willing to cede the area without much fight. This is a challenge that barely registers above the din of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

More’s the pity: The competition among Mekong countries, each seeking to harness its bounty for parochial goals, is intensifying. The river is Asia’s third-longest and among the world’s most biodiverse and productive. The planet’s largest inland fishery winds through six nations 1and the livelihoods of almost 70 million people depend upon it.

Diplomatic Failures

Asia’s premier diplomatic body, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, isn’t up to the task of policing the river. This reflects a wariness of taking on China, which controls the headwaters and is the largest trading partner of almost every other state, as well as a historical reluctance to interfere in each other’s business. Either way, it is victim to a whatever-you-can-get-away with attitude.

The Mekong tragedy has more than one villain. The basin has more than 700 dams, according to the Stimson Center, the most impactful of which lie in China, altering the flow of water and nutrient-laden sediment in profound ways. Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam are culpable, too. Mining is hollowing out the riverbed. Sitting in one of the restaurants that dot the waterfront of Phnom Penh, it’s easy to lose count of the sand barges that chug past. Drive for less than an hour and residents will show you collapsed riverbanks.

But what China does matters greatly. If the White House truly wants to constrain the nation’s ascent, a pivot to the Mekong is in order. The withdrawal of funds for key conservation projects by the United States Agency for International Development is a bad start. In the absence of a counterweight, it’s China that will have the biggest say and local governments will defer to Beijing. The world’s second-biggest economy is next door and, unlike America, isn’t going anywhere.

More Than Half of Mekong River Dams Were Added After 2000

Fifty years after the last helicopter left Saigon, Americans still have a stake in what happens in these countries. Thailand is a treaty partner. US naval ships occasionally call at Vietnamese ports; Hanoi and Washington have in the past jointly protested Chinese drills in the South China Sea. The economies have become vital for global supply chains; Vietnam has been a prized destination for US corporations looking for factory sites outside China. Much of Cambodia’s textile exports are destined for the US, and despite that country’s move to nurture ties with Beijing, its economy is largely dollarized. Greenbacks are widely used in everyday life. Those BYD vehicles are priced in US dollars. America is still a player, and can be in the future, despite Trump’s apparent nonchalance.

“Who is going to stand up to China here?” Suebsakun Kidnukorn, who teaches social innovation at Mae Fah Luang University, asked me one recent afternoon in the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai. “It’s not just a physical change, but a change in our mindset, in our psychology. People know China is here and fear it.”

A Storied History

Nations have long sought supremacy over the Mekong’s waters. French engineers devised schemes to dynamite cataracts and waterfalls to open commercial passages to China, grandiose designs that ultimately failed. Before that, Spanish and Dutch adventurers dabbled in making the waterway work for them. The post-1945 period was under American sway until Communists triumphed in Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane three decades later. But the current aspirations for the river, which leave it dramatically altered, are something the French could scarcely dream about, and Washington’s Cold Warriors only glimpsed.

There’s no shortage of ambition. More dams are planned. Road and rail arteries once considered pie-in-the-sky have become feasible. Laos wants to become the “battery of Southeast Asia,” exporting power as far afield as Malaysia and Singapore. Vietnam needs to fuel its manufacturing boom but is running out of sand, and likely to fall back on what’s mined in other Mekong countries.

The problem is that the race to harness the river has no real serious umpire. The Mekong River Commission, formed in 1995 in an accord between Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, has no enforcement power. China isn’t a signatory, though it is a dialogue partner. The commission promotes dialogue, but its inability to force compliance means dams and diversion projects have proceeded at a rapid clip.

The limits of the MRC reflect the shortcomings of the Asean.2 It talks a good game but its response to important issues tends to underwhelm. The association is light years away from the shared jurisdiction and sovereignty that makes the European Union effective. Leaders publicly abhor anything that can be considered interference in the internal affairs of neighbors. This, by design, constrains the commission and sets efforts to preserve the Mekong up for failure. National priorities come first, collective action a distant second.

Asean doesn’t have to be completely hamstrung, however. The haze from fires in Indonesia that choked large parts of the region in the 1980s and 1990s became bad enough that joining forces couldn’t be avoided. Still, that was a challenge that lay almost entirely within the group and didn’t require standing up to an outside power, let alone one as huge as China. Nor did it end the haze itself. It would be a brave nation that takes the lead on managing access to the river, which has given, and taken, lives for thousands of years. Still, the prolonged degradation of such a shared watercourse will, at some point, become too significant to ignore.

The Mekong saga also underscores the differences in approach of the region’s maritime nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, and the mainland economies. If the countries for whom the river is their backyard don’t want any intervention, why should those surrounded by the sea push for one and aggravate China? They have their own issues with President Xi Jinping, who is asserting sovereignty over reefs and militarizing small islands in the South China Sea. These smaller economies have their hands full with Beijing.

Local Activism

Some communities aren’t waiting for the MRC. Beyond the frustrations of diplomacy, this is also a story of occasional wins by grass-roots organizations, and the courage and advocacy of a few individuals. Niwat Roykaew, a former school teacher from Chiang Khong in Thailand, won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his role in persuading Thai authorities to walk away from a river-blasting project. The idea was to blow up sections of the Mekong near the Laos border. The destruction would have been huge — and cleared the way for Chinese cargo ships.

When I met Niwat at a local conservation group’s headquarters, he was under no illusion that he’ll change the course of history. But piece by piece, some worst-case scenarios can be mitigated. The issue isn’t one of development versus no development, he said, or of opposing China on grounds of ideology. “The Mekong has always been about politics, going back to the French days,” he told me. “Now, it’s about China. OK, for now we stopped them, but they haven’t let go of the thought. The lesson is never to give up.”

Chanarong Wongla is another warrior. Together with other activists, he pushed the Thai government to ask Laos to consider another location for a contentious dam, the Sanakham hydropower venture, planned for the Mekong mainstream a few miles north of their town of Chiang Khan. This might sound like a procedural victory; Laos isn’t obliged to move the location. But he’ll take it. “Local people do not have the power to intervene in the diplomatic process, so we take it project by project,” he told me.

Despite the breakthrough, Chanarong is in mourning for the Mekong that existed in his youth. Back then, if you wanted to have a fish dinner, you first lit the fire, warmed the water and got everything ready. Last was the fish. He would walk down to the river, throw a line, get a bite immediately, land it and take it back to the boiling pot. Now, you would have to fish for days. Dams skew natural fluctuations in water levels, affecting migration and spawning.

Piecemeal approaches have their place. When diplomats fail and collective action is absent, stakeholders need to act where they can. But it can’t be left to provincial players. Communities will keep being diminished, and migration to crowded urban areas in search of jobs will continue. The densely populated Mekong delta of Vietnam is sinking.

Controversial Canal

If there’s one project that epitomizes the mix of domestic politics and financial statecraft, it’s the Funan-Techo Canal in Cambodia. It’s just outside the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, about 15 minutes past the turn to Xi Jinping Boulevard.

The 112-mile passage, which aims to link the Phnom Penh area with the Gulf of Thailand, has been contentious since the day it was conceived. The watercourse will give ships a path to the sea without having to navigate through Vietnam. The price, which local media say could run to $1.7 billion, is heavy for one of Asia’s poorest nations. Where would Cambodia get the money, and could the work ultimately be used for military purposes? (China has already helped upgrade a Cambodian naval base on the coast.) The project is bound to further alter the flow of water and sediment. Wet season flooding, which lays the ground for agriculture and provides vital spawning grounds for fish, is likely to be curtailed.

China Backs Ambitious Cambodian Canal

Cambodia has done little to alleviate these concerns. In its August 2023 advice to the MRC, the government claims the work will be on tributaries, and not on the mainstream Mekong. That significantly reduces its obligations to other MRC members and allows for accelerated construction. The government’s claims are problematic. Having visited the site, it’s hard to portray the water as being from anywhere other than the Mekong. Phnom Penh’s submission described the canals use as primarily economic, to aid navigation and tourism. Cambodia has subsequently played up benefits to agriculture and irrigation. The shifting narrative doesn’t inspire confidence.

Irrigation is only required during the dry season, according to Brian Eyler, director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asian program, and the MRC accord states that such diversion projects must be agreed upon by the nations. “The Cambodian government, from its own position, acted very smartly,” said Eyler, author of the book Last Days of the Mighty Mekong. “But they missed the long game. By applying their own interpretation of the agreement, that paves the way for others to do the same. I fear it will be the undoing of the Mekong agreement.”

It isn’t too late for Cambodia to reconsider. Opening to consultation and greater scrutiny might result in some changes around the edges that alleviate the worst environmental damage, and ease suspicions of neighbors. But it’s highly unlikely the project will be stopped. That power would rest with Prime Minister Hun Manet or, maybe, with the undertaking’s backers. China, the top creditor to Cambodia, is courting Southeast Asia as a way of countering US efforts to isolate it. American officials have expressed concern that the People’s Liberation Army seeks a presence in the Gulf of Thailand, something both Beijing and Phnom Penh deny.

While the MRC has plenty of flaws, the Stimson Center did note positive signs in its most recent annual report on the Mekong. China pledged to share some dam operations data with the commission. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam agreed to a pilot study on how they might jointly operate some dams. And some wet season flows of water, historically vital to the movement of natural sediment and the ability of floodwaters to provide fertile material for agriculture in the dry season, suffered smaller reductions in recent years than previously.

The Mekong has served the communities along its banks for millennia. Now, thanks to technology, a voracious appetite for energy and resources, and the ability to extract them on a grand scale, the river faces a transformation that may leave it unrecognizable to past generations. A plea from Chanarong resonated with me: Don’t forget about us. The Mekong belongs not just to people and businesses, but to humanity.

Do we really lack the capacity to preserve it? Are nations so bereft of imagination and will? The answers aren’t encouraging. Until the Mekong is more of a unifier and less of a divider, this great asset will be forever diminished.

By Daniel Moss – Bloomberg Agency – June 11, 2025