Word: southeast
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...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 on the upper Mekong are completed in the nation's western Yunnan province. Two have already been built. At least six more are planned...
...Mekong's nutrient-rich waters to feed their fields. Yet Chinese dams, along with engineering projects to make the river navigable by larger vessels, have begun to ravage the river's ecology by blocking sediment and producing unnatural water flows that dissuade fish migration and spawning. The nonprofit Southeast Asian Rivers Network estimates that fish stocks on the Thai-Laos border have already declined by half because of Chinese activity. Farmers, too, complain that the once-predictable floods needed to nourish their paddies have been disrupted by the two existing Chinese dams - and the cavalcade of future hydropower projects will...
...Mekong is not so unyielding these days. In 2001, Chinese crews, brought in by Southeast Asian governments eager to increase traffic and trade, began blasting and dredging a stretch of the river running from Burma and Laos to Thailand, clearing away islands, reefs and rapids that once blocked the passage of ships. Since then, sleepy Southeast Asian river ports have morphed into boomtowns, with boats from China disgorging cheap electronics, fruits, vegetables and every kind of plastic gadget imaginable. River traffic runs both ways: in December 2006, the first shipment of refined oil chugged up the Mekong bound for energy...
...well as the capital's main park and the National Cultural Hall, were all built with money given to the city by the Beijing government. More than 3,000 Chinese laborers are also busy constructing a national stadium, the centerpiece of Laos' debut as host of the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. "Laos is profiting from China's own development path," says Sun Lei, the president of the Lao-China Business Association and owner of the Mekong Hotel in downtown Vientiane. "Without China's help and advice, Laos would be much more backward...
...much of the summer, Art Bunting says "it was getting dry" near his corn and soybean farm in Dwight, Ill., about 80 miles southeast of Chicago. Between the drought and rising demand for corn to produce ethanol, "some people were worried we weren't going to grow enough corn," he says. Now, however, it's a different story. During next month's harvest, Bunting says he expects a higher yield of corn - partly because he increased the amount of acres he's devoted to the crop, but also because the recent "good weather" has helped kernels of corn get plumper...