In Bangkok in 2010, Chinese and Thai authorities were discussing a dream: the possibility of working together on a high-speed rail project, which would be Southeast Asia’s first. The railway would link Bangkok with Nong Khai on the border with Laos, where it would connect with another Chinese-built high-speed rail network, eventually reaching Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southern China.
Those discussions occurred three years before Chinese President Xi Jinping would eventually launch the Belt and Road Initiative.
But the Thai-China railway has become a Belt and Road flagship project, symbolising China’s ambition to monopolise the provision of economic connectivity and high-tech infrastructure in developing Southeast Asia.
China had offered to finance the project through a loan worth more than US$12 billion. After 14 long years of tense negotiations, delays, deteriorating bilateral ties, cancellations, and debates over the risk of BRI “debt traps”, the Thai government has ultimately made the call to go ahead with construction – but crucially, to finance the entire project themselves.
Stories like this abound throughout Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, China’s failure to implement several transport megaprojects looks likely to lead to interventions by Japan and Korea. In Malaysia, a cloud of corruption controversy has caused the government to withdraw from two energy pipeline megaprojects. These projects, and many others, form the basis of a new Lowy Institute Data Snapshot, Mind the Gap: Ambition versus delivery in China’s BRI megaprojects in Southeast Asia, which seeks to explain the gap between promises and delivery in China’s activities in Southeast Asia.
We have analysed the Thai-China High Speed Railway and 23 other infrastructure megaprojects promised by China to Southeast Asian countries. These projects together are worth some US$77 billion – but promises worth more than $50 billion are yet to be fulfilled.
