Mongabay-July 17, 2018
As governments in Southeast Asia target economic growth through infrastructure development, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has emerged as a ready funder for some of the most ambitious and expensive projects.
Regional leaders have been quick to seize the opportunity offered by Beijing, but environmental experts warn that many of these projects could cause irreversible environmental damage in highly biodiverse areas.
The infrastructure push has come in two waves this past decade, both aimed at establishing new roads, ports and railways across the region in pursuit of improved trade and logistics. In 2010, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announced its Master Plan for Connectivity, which seeks to boost regional integration among the 10 member countries of the bloc through infrastructure projects. Three years later, China inaugurated its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1 trillion transportation and energy infrastructure construction juggernaut aimed to give Beijing a strong presence in markets across the region as well as Africa and Europe. The initiative is slated for completion in 2049.
Overall, these and other initiatives would see paved roads in Asia’s developing nations double in length in the next few years, according to a 2017 report.
ASEAN is one of China’s largest trading partners, and given its vast natural resources and geographical proximity to China, the association of fast-growing nations is a key priority for the BRI.
More than 60 percent of Chinese overseas direct investment (ODI) to BRI countries from 2013 to 2015 went to Asean member states, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit. China’s total ODI in BRI countries was $21.4 billion in 2015, up from $13.6 billion in 2014 and $12.6 billion in 2013. Much of this money has gone to finance large, and often highly controversial, infrastructure projects.
One of them, for instance, is a high-speed rail line in Indonesia, which the government in Jakarta shelved due to a lack of proper environmental impact studies and conflicts with local zoning plans. Also in Indonesia, a massive dam project supported by the Bank of China and Sinohydro, China’s hydropower authority, has been widely criticizedfor threatening the only known habitat of the world’s rarest great ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.
There have also been complaints in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia about potential damage to the environment and communities from Chinese-backed hydropower projects along the Mekong River.
WHAT’S AT STAKE?
The BRI may appear to be an ambitious take on globalization, by covering 68 countries through trade and commerce and linking them to China, but there’s more to it than that, says Mason Campbell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University in Australia.
“It’s basically under the guise of internationalizing China, but it’s more about resource extraction and attaining materials,” Campbell told Mongabay on the sidelines of the 2018 conference of the Association for Tropical Biodiversity Conservation in Kuching, Malaysia, in early July.
Campbell, whose work has focused on the Pan Borneo Highway — a project to linking the two Malaysian states on the island with the nation of Brunei — said China’s way of asserting its influence in most infrastructure projects was typically by pushing for Chinese companies to work abroad or finance a development project in a foreign country that would eventually benefit China.
China has pursued minerals, fossil fuels, agricultural commodities and timber from other nations under this model. As a net importer of coal, China has more than 1,600 plants scheduled to be built by Chinese firms in more than 62 countries, including in Southeast Asia.
Read more at https://news.mongabay.com/2018/07/single-minded-determination-chinas-global-infrastructure-spree-rings-alarm-bells/
