Word: yunnan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...park its ballooning foreign-exchange reserves, the riverfront capitals of Phnom Penh and Vientiane now gleam with Chinese-built roads, buildings and other infrastructure. The torrent of investment will likely grow even greater next year when Chinese construction workers finish building a 1,100-mile (1,800-km) Yunnan-Bangkok highway that parallels a section of the Mekong. "Chinese are natural businessmen," says Liu Jingchun, a Chinese boat captain who transports goods between Yunnan and northern Thailand. "For so many years, we shut ourselves off from doing business. Now that we're allowed to trade again, it's like...
...Such concerns are mystifying for the dirt-streaked farmers who are loading their produce onto ships in Guanlei, the Yunnan port from which most Chinese goods set sail down the Mekong. "I've heard it's hard to grow crops in the countries downriver," says Wu Zhencha, who has arrived in Guanlei with boxes of broccoli destined for Thailand and who is unaware that the Mekong basin is, in fact, one of the most fertile regions on earth. Because of the trade with Indochina, Wu's village now boasts a paved road linking it to the highway. Modern pleasures like...
...Deep in the verdant mountains of Yunnan province, an army of 10,000 workers, some wearing prison-labor uniforms, are toiling on a construction site of enormous proportions. In 2010, this remote section of the Mekong will be transformed into a placid reservoir, drowning the jagged gorges that now cradle the river. Constructed by the Huaneng Group, China's biggest power producer, Xiaowan dam is the nation's second-largest power project after the Three Gorges. As the biggest of the eight dams China plans for its portion of the Mekong, Xiaowan will dwarf the two hydropower projects that have...
...with China's energy needs soaring even in underdeveloped provinces like Yunnan, the Mekong is potent enough to be exploited for electricity. Some of that power, ironically, will be exported to countries like Thailand, where hydroelectric projects are controversial and have been blocked by ecologically minded citizens. Huaneng doesn't have to worry about public interference. The state-owned company is run by the well-connected son of China's former Premier, Li Peng. And with no shareholders calling for environmental-impact surveys or feasibility studies, Huaneng rarely makes public details of its plans until just months before it breaks...