Word: cambodia
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...millenniums, China hardly touched the mighty Mekong, content to let its raging headwaters flow unimpeded from the Tibetan plateau down through Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But over the past few years, the emergent superpower has begun turning the world's 12th-longest river into a highway for regional commerce and a source of hydroelectric power. For many Indochinese entrepreneurs, increased China trade and investment has allowed a backward region to participate in their upstream neighbor's remarkable economic expansion. Southeast Asian governments hope China will share the electricity it will harness after a series of massive dams...
...nets yield almost no fish today, the same as yesterday and the day before that. For generations, Bun Neang's family has depended on the bounty of Cambodia's Tonle Sap, a vast lake fed by one of the world's greatest rivers, the Mekong. Two decades ago, his father could rely on a daily catch totaling about 65 lbs. (30 kg). When the water gods were feeling particularly charitable, he would land a Mekong catfish, a massive bottom-feeder that can weigh as much as a tiger. But today, when Bun Neang dips his net into the caramel-hued...
...Southeast Asians are quite as sanguine about the flourishing trade. Memories of imperial domination still haunt Vietnam, which was colonized by China and repelled invading Chinese troops as recently as 1979. In Cambodia, many still remember the People's Republic's patronage of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, which oversaw the deaths of an estimated one-quarter of the population. And even in countries with less complicated historical ties to China, suspicions of an economic overpowering endure. Farmers in northern Thailand complain that they cannot compete with the influx of cheap Chinese-grown garlic, apples and onions. Even Thai customs...
...water is hydroelectric power - and until recently the river's remoteness discouraged even that. "In China, the Mekong is not the same river as it is down in the basin," notes Eric Baran, a research scientist based in Phnom Penh for the nonprofit World Fish Center. "Here in Cambodia, it is a matter of life and death. In China, it is just another river - and not even a very major...
...died in the fighting and bombings and spraying of toxic chemicals like Agent Orange if the U.S. had "stayed the course" in a prolonged Vietnam War? And if the U.S. military had actually stayed in South Vietnam past 1973, would Hanoi really have been in a position to invade Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over and began its murderous reign? The Khmer Rouge's genocidal regime was finally ended in 1979 with an invasion by the communist Vietnamese army...