A Jungle Airstrip Stirs Suspicions About China’s Plans for Cambodia

The Chinese military’s “string of pearls” strategy depends on far-flung regional outposts. Cambodia is becoming one.
By Hannah Beech

The runway at Dara Sakor International Airport, which a Chinese company is constructing, will be the longest in Cambodia.

DARA SAKOR, Cambodia — The airstrip stretches like a scar through what was once unspoiled Cambodian jungle.
When completed next year on a remote stretch of shoreline, Dara Sakor International Airport will boast the longest runway in Cambodia, complete with the kind of tight turning bay favored by fighter jet pilots.
Nearby, workers are clearing trees from a national park to make way for a port deep enough to host naval ships.
The politically connected Chinese company building the airstrip and port says the facilities are for civilian use.
But the scale of the land deal at Dara Sakor — which secures 20 percent of Cambodia’s coastline for 99 years — has raised eyebrows, especially since the portion of the project built so far is already moldering in malarial jungle.
The activity at Dara Sakor and other nearby Chinese projects is stirring fears that Beijing plans to turn this small Southeast Asian nation into a de facto military outpost.
Already, a far-flung Chinese construction boom — on disputed islands in the South China Sea, across the Indian Ocean and onward to Beijing’s first military base overseas, in the African Horn nation of Djibouti — has raised alarms about China’s military ambitions at a time when the United States’ presence in the region has waned.
Known as the “string of pearls,” Beijing’s defense strategy would benefit from a jewel in Cambodia.
“Why would the Chinese show up in the middle of a jungle to build a runway?” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
“This will allow China to project its air power through the region, and it changes the whole game.”

A Chinese construction project in the Dara Sakor investment zone. China is Cambodia’s biggest investor.

As China extends its might overseas, it is bumping up against a regional security umbrella shaped by the United States decades ago.
Cambodia, a recipient of Western largess after American bombs devastated its countryside during the Vietnam War, was supposed to be firmly ensconced in the democratic political orbit.
But to win his place as Asia’s longest-serving leader, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has turned his back on free elections and rule of law.
He excoriates the United States while warmly embracing China, which is now Cambodia’s largest investor and trading partner.
Down the coast from Dara Sakor, American military officials say, China has reached a deal for exclusive rights to expand an existing Cambodian naval base, even as Beijing denies military intentions in the country.
“We are concerned that the runway and port facilities at Dara Sakor are being constructed on a scale that would be useful for military purposes and which greatly exceed current and projected infrastructure needs for commercial activity,” Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn, a Pentagon spokesman, said by email.
“Any steps by the Cambodian government to invite a foreign military presence,” Colonel Eastburn added, “would disturb peace and stability in Southeast Asia.”

Raising a billboard for a Dara Sakor construction project. The Cambodian government says the area of southwestern Cambodia will be a global logistics hub.

An American intelligence report published this year raised the possibility that “Cambodia’s slide toward autocracy,” as Hun Sen tightens his 34-year grip on power, “could lead to a Chinese military presence in the country.”
This month, the United States Treasury Department accused a senior general linked to Dara Sakor of corruption and imposed sanctions on him.
Hun Sen denies that he is letting China’s military set up in Cambodia.
Instead, his government claims that Dara Sakor’s runway and port will transform this remote rainforest into a global logistics hub that will “make miracles possible,” as Dara Sakor’s promotional literature puts it.
“There will be no Chinese military in Cambodia, none at all, and to say that is a fabrication,” said Pay Siphan, a government spokesman.
“Maybe the white people want to hold Cambodia back by stopping us from developing our economy.”

The home of Ban Em’s family in Chamlang Kou village will be razed to make way for a “military port built by the Chinese,” her husband, Thim Lim, said Cambodian officials told him.

An Unusual Land Deal
In July, armed men in military uniforms arrived at the wooden house of Thim Lim, a fisherman who lives in Cambodia’s largest national park.
Leave, they demanded.
Mr. Thim Lim said he was told by officials from the Ministry of Land Management that his home would be demolished next year to make way for a “military port built by the Chinese.”
Other villagers who attended the meeting confirmed his account.
Land officials wouldn’t comment.
“China is so big that it can do what it wants to do,” Mr. Thim Lim said.
Mr. Thim Lim’s land is part of the Dara Sakor concession leased more than a decade ago to Union Development Group, an obscure Chinese company with no international footprint apart from its 110,000-acre Cambodian acquisition.

Villagers sorting fishing nets in Chamlang Kou. It is part of the Dara Sakor land concession, which was leased to a Chinese company under unusual terms.

The deal was questionable from its inception.
With no open bidding process, Union Development was handed a 99-year lease on a concession triple the size of what Cambodia’s land law allows. 
The company was exempted from any lease payments for a decade.
On Dec. 9, Gen. Kun Kim, a former military chief of staff, and his family became targets of United States Treasury sanctions for profiting from relationships with a “China state-owned entity” and for having used “soldiers to intimidate, demolish and clear out land.”
While the Chinese firm was not named, rights groups and local residents said it was Union Development.
Presiding over the signing of the Dara Sakor deal in 2008 was Zhang Gaoli, once among China’s top leaders.
The company’s promotional materials call the development “the largest seashore investment project not only in Southeast Asia but in the world.”
Even with generous lease terms, the one part of Dara Sakor that has been built, a resort complex, is languishing.
On a recent day, the golf course was empty and the casino deserted.
The marina restaurant attracted one Chinese family, which had brought seafood in a plastic bag to avoid paying resort prices.
Instead of retreating from a faltering venture, Union Development has doubled down.
The new construction at Dara Sakor includes a 10,500-foot runway and a deep-sea port able to handle 10,000-ton vessels.

The Dara Sakor Resort, which includes Koh Kong Casino, has seen little tourist traffic.

Who controls the venture remains opaque.
For years, Union Development claimed Dara Sakor was entirely private.
Yet Gen. Chhum Socheat, Cambodia’s deputy defense minister, told The New York Times that the nation’s civil aviation authority was running the airport project, meaning that it could not possibly be linked to the Chinese military.
Sin Chansereyvutha, a spokesman for the State Secretariat of Civil Aviation, however, said that “we don’t have an agreement” for Dara Sakor airport.
In May, Union Development handed Hun Sen, the prime minister, a check for $1 million for the Cambodian Red Cross, which his wife runs.
The company’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, are decorated with pictures of Gen. Tea Banh, Cambodia’s defense minister, striding across Dara Sakor’s golf course.
Union Development Group’s main office is next to the defense minister’s home.

Construction at the Chinese-built Sealong Bay International Beach Resort development, near Cambodia’s largest naval base.

‘China Is Looking for Our Prosperity’
Less than 50 miles from Dara Sakor, another nearly empty Chinese-built development rises from another national park.
The Sealong Bay International Beach Resort has sea views and Chinese chefs.
But it’s the project’s neighbor that has been attracting the most attention: Ream Naval Base, Cambodia’s largest.
“All these projects thrive off ambiguity because you’re never really sure what’s going on,” said Devin Thorne, co-author of “Harbored Ambitions,” a study by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington research group, on China’s maritime strategy in the Indo-Pacific.
“You’ll have five Chinese port proposals; two of them fall through and then suddenly there’s one more next door. It’s really hard to keep track of.”
In July, The Wall Street Journal reported on a secret draft agreement to give China exclusive access to part of Ream Naval Base for 30 years.

Cambodian ships at Ream Naval Base. American officials suspect there are plans for Ream “that involve hosting Chinese military assets.”

Speculation about Ream intensified this year when the United States, which had acceded to a Cambodian request to refurbish U.S.-funded training and boat maintenance facilities on the base, was notified that the Cambodians no longer wanted the Americans’ help.
“The withdrawal of the request six months later was surprising and raises questions about the Cambodian government’s plans for the base,” said Colonel Eastburn, the Pentagon spokesman.
General Chhum Socheat, the deputy defense minister, denied that Cambodia had asked the Americans for money for Ream.
“We are frankly fed up,” he told The Times.
“Do we have to ask the United States to develop our sovereignty? Do we have to beg the United States to do this project, that one?”
But in a May 8 letter to the Cambodian Defense Ministry, the American defense attaché in Phnom Penh noted that Cambodia had “requested U.S. assistance to conduct repairs and minor renovations to U.S.-provided facilities on the base.”
In a response a month later, a Cambodian defense official replied that “the repairs and renovations of the facilities on the base are no longer necessary.”
In a subsequent letter, Joseph Felter, then the American deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, warned General Tea Banh, the defense minister, of suspicions “that this sudden change of policy could indicate larger plans for changes at Ream Naval Base, particularly ones that involve hosting Chinese military assets.”
The defense minister did not answer the letter.

Hun Sen, center, at a groundbreaking ceremony for a Chinese-built bridge in Cambodia. “We are very good friends,” a spokesman for his government said, referring to China.

Hun Sen and his deputies accuse the United States of trying to foment a revolution against his government.
In July, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill seeking to impose sanctions on individuals who have undermined democracy in Cambodia. 
Associates of Hun Sen, who has crushed his political opponents, could be among them.
Two years ago, the Cambodian military suspended joint military exercises with the Americans and began partnering with the Chinese instead.
Then, in a further sign of deepening military ties, Hun Sen announced in July that he had spent $240 million on Chinese weaponry.
“If the U.S. Embassy, they don’t like us, they can pack up and leave,” Pay Siphan, the government spokesman, who is a dual Cambodian and American citizen, said in an interview.
“They are troublemakers, and we see it when they look down on Cambodia.”
“China is looking for our prosperity,” he added.
“We are very good friends.”

An empty lifeguard tower on the beach at Dara Sakor Resort.

Chinese Peril

Freeing China's South Asian string of 'little pearls'
By Michael Bender


The annual G20 Summit reminded us that disregarded countries also can be opportunities. 

As the escalating U.S. trade war with Communist China dominates attention, smaller countries that Americans don’t think much about are suddenly important pieces of the Chinese chessboard. 

They offer an important lesson in the perils of our dismissive strategic engagement, but also an opportunity to challenge China’s growing national security hegemony while not harming America’s consumers and economy.
China has what it calls a “String of Pearls” strategy to dominate small countries in Southeast and South Asia — a maritime Silk Road along the world’s most vital maritime route that the U.S. Navy and its allies will be hard-pressed to counter. 

Stretching from the South China Seas to the Horn of Africa, the route is linked with deep-water “commercial” ports and bases — the so-called pearls — and with them China will tighten its string of control in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
China’s island-building and outright appropriation of islands in the South China Sea — and America’s seemingly too-little, too-late opposition — is well-known. 

But it is the Maldives and Sri Lanka, the largely ignored but critically significant “Little Pearls” of South Asia, that still offer hope.
In recent years, China has pumped resources into the diminutive island nation of the Maldives. 

It established a Joint Ocean Observation Station on the Mukunudhoo atoll near a crucial shipping route close to India. 

This follows China’s previous acquisition of 17 other islands in the same area, raising concerns that the real and unstated purpose is for naval dominance. 

Last March, shortly after announcing the JOOS initiative, Beijing sent a combat naval force there to reassure the pro-China Maldivian president during a declared state-of-emergency.
Meanwhile, China’s huge infrastructure “investments” have driven Maldives into an unpayable debt equal to more than 25% of the archipelago’s GDP.
To the opposite side of India’s southern tip, Sri Lanka is becoming a more important “Little Pearl” on China’s string. 

The George W. Bush administration halted U.S. aid to Sri Lanka in 2007, leaving Communist China to jump in and fill the vacuum. 

Since then, the state-owned China Communication Construction Company (CCCC) funded a multibillion-dollar “Port City” project in the port city capital of Colombo, with over $13 billion expected to be invested in this project over the next 20 years. 

Beijing is poised to monopolize the financial and development market of the benign but geo-strategically important island nation.
Meanwhile, China is building a billion-dollar deep water complex called Hambantota Port on the south of Sri Lanka, about 10 nautical miles from the main shipping route between Asia and Europe. The port project gives the Chinese primary operational control of the port for the next 99 years. 

Smaller deals, such as the $50 million to be paid to a state-run Chinese company to augment the state-run Jaya Container Terminal, are also completed fairly regularly and continue to add to financial leverage that the Chinese are accumulating over Sri Lanka.
With Sri Lanka’s debt, much of it to China, continuing to balloon out of control, Beijing has seized on this as an opportunity to gain further control of Sri Lanka’s financial future through its manipulative loan collection practices and by controlling of some of the country’s most significant commercial facilities, and capturing Sri Lanka in an $8 billion debt-trap.
Making matters worse is Sri Lanka’s ongoing constitutional crisis that has paralyzed the country politically for several months — and promises to continue to do so for another year. 

The Chinese have taken advantage of the crisis, squeezing Sri Lank for more and more development deals.
Sri Lanka’s political leadership is paralyzed. 

In late October, President Maithripala Sirisena sacked his prime minister and appointed his arch-rival Mahinda Rajapaksa, the still-popular former president, in his place. 

This rare moment of realpolitik and unity in Sri Lanka was short-loved, however, because the incumbent prime minister refuses to step aside. 

Now the Supreme Court of the nation is seemingly overburdened with being the sole entity responsible for solving the constitutional stand-off and re-instating a functional government.
Without effective leadership, Sri Lanka will continue to drift into the hands of the Chinese — which the obdurate former prime minister seemingly welcomes. 

Only a snap election, such as a plebiscite, can break the stalemate and empower the Sri Lankan people to pick their own prime minister — and to break Chinese Communist economic, military, and political domination of their country.
The growth of China’s commercial investment and soft power in South Asia’s “Little Pearls” bring Beijing closer to achieving their global ambitions. 

They also erode democratic values and processes in nations like the Maldives and Sri Lanka, whose democracies have begun to crumble under the weight of burgeoning debt and influence from the power-driven, Communist hegemon.
The G20 summit is an opportunity to highlight these troubling facts. 

The Trump Administration must not only expose Beijing’s economically disastrous developmental schemes as the manipulative power grabs that they really are. 

It must also actively engage the vulnerable small nations targeted in China’s String of Pearls. 

In doing so, the United States can strike at China’s mercantile and military hegemony while gaining much-needed leverage over the Red Tiger’s other economic and fiscal bullying, and help to free vulnerable countries like Sri Lanka and the Maldives from indenture. 

It’s time to free China’s “Little Pearls.”

Chinese Peril

What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence
By BROOK LARMER 

Illustration by Andrew Rae

The four-lane highway leading out of the Sri Lankan town of Hambantota gets so little traffic that it sometimes attracts more wild elephants than automobiles. 

The pachyderms are intelligent — they seem to use the road as a jungle shortcut — but not intelligent enough, alas, to appreciate the pun their course embodies: It links together a series of white elephants, i.e. boondoggles, built and financed by the Chinese. 

Beyond the lonely highway itself, there is a 35,000-seat cricket stadium, an almost vacant $1.5 billion deepwater port and, 16 miles inland, a $209 million jewel known as “the world’s emptiest international airport.”
Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the second-largest in Sri Lanka, is designed to handle a million passengers per year. 

It currently receives about a dozen passengers per day. 

Business is so slow that the airport has made more money from renting out the unused cargo terminals for rice storage than from flight-related activities. 

In one burst of activity last year, 350 security personnel armed with firecrackers were deployed to scare off wild animals, the airport’s most common visitors.
Projects like Mattala are not driven by local economic needs but by remote stratagems. 

When Sri Lanka’s 27-year civil war ended in 2009, the president at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa, fixated on the idea of turning his poor home district into a world-class business and tourism hub to help its moribund economy. 

China, with a dream of its own, was happy to oblige. 

Hambantota sits in a very strategic location, just a few miles north of the vital Indian Ocean shipping lane over which more than 80 percent of China’s imported oil travels. 

A port added luster to the “string of pearls” that China was starting to assemble all along the so-called Maritime Silk Road.
Sadly, no travelers came, only the bills. 

The Mattala airport has annual revenues of roughly $300,000, but now it must repay China $23.6 million a year for the next eight years, according to Sri Lanka’s Transport and Civil Aviation Ministry. 

Over all, around 90 percent of the country’s revenues goes to servicing debt. 

Even a new president who took office in 2015 on a promise to curb Chinese influence succumbed to financial reality.
To relieve its debt crisis, Sri Lanka has put its white elephants up for sale. 

In late July, the government agreed to give China control of the deepwater port — a 70 percent equity stake over 99 years — in exchange for writing off $1.1 billion of the island’s debt. (China has promised to invest another $600 million to make the port commercially viable.) 

When the preliminary deal was first floated in January, protests erupted in response to the sell-off of national sovereignty, a reminder of Sri Lanka’s colonial past under British rule. 

“We always thought China’s investments would help our economy,” says Amantha Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist and university researcher. 

“But now there’s a sense that we’ve been maneuvered into selling some of the family jewels.”
As the United States beats a haphazard retreat from the world — nixing trade agreements, eschewing diplomacy, antagonizing allies — China marches on with its unabashedly ambitious global-expansion program known as One Belt, One Road. 

The branding is awkward: “Belt” refers to the land-bound trading route through Central Asia and Europe, while “Road,” confusingly, stands for the maritime route stretching from Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. 

Still, the intentions are clear: With a lending and acquisitions blitz extending to 68 countries (and counting), OBOR seeks to create the ports, roads and rail and telecommunications links for a modern-day Silk Road — with all paths leading to China.

Illustration by Andrew Rae

This is China’s long game. 

It’s not about immediate profits; infrastructure projects are a bad way to make money. 

So why is Xi Jinping fast-tracking OBOR projects amid an economic slowdown at home and a crackdown on other overseas acquisitions? 

Economics is a big part: China wants to secure access to key resources, export its idle industrial capacity, even tilt the world order in its favor. 

But there is also a far greater political ambition. 

For centuries, Western liberalism has ruled the world. The Chinese believe their time has come. 

“China sees itself as a "great" civilization that needs to regain its status as leader of the world,” says Kadira Pethiyagoda, a fellow at the Brookings Institution Doha Center. 

“And America’s retreat gives China the space to do that.”
It’s tempting to see OBOR as a muscled-up Marshall Plan, the American-led program that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. 

OBOR, too, is designed to build vital infrastructure, spread prosperity and drive global development. Yet little of what China offers is aid or even low-interest lending. 

Much OBOR financing comes in the form of market-rate loans that weaker countries are eager to receive — but struggle to repay. 

Even when the projects are well suited for the local economy, the result can look a bit like a shell game: Things are built, money goes to Chinese companies and the country is saddled with more debt. 

What happens when, as is often the case, infrastructure projects are driven more by geopolitical ambition or the need to give China’s state-owned companies something to do? 

Well, Sri Lanka has an empty airport for sale.
Sri Lanka is a harbinger for debt crises to come. 

Many other OBOR countries have taken on huge Chinese loans that could prove difficult to repay. 

For example, Chinese banks, according to The Financial Times, recently lent Pakistan $1.2 billion to stave off a currency crisis — even as they pledged $57 billion more to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. 

“The projects China proposes are so big and appealing and revolutionary that many small countries can’t resist,” says Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at New Delhi’s Center for Policy Research. 

“They take on loans like it’s a drug addiction and then get trapped in debt servitude. It’s clearly part of China’s geostrategic vision.”
This charge conjures the specter of colonialism, when the British and Dutch weaponized debt to take control of nations’ strategic assets. 

Unlike Western countries and institutions that try to influence how developing countries govern themselves, China says it espouses the principle of noninterference. 

If local partners benefit from a new road or port, the Chinese suggest, shouldn’t they be able to “win,” too — by securing its main trade routes, building loyal partnerships and enhancing its global prestige?

The last time China was a global power, back in the early 1400s, it also sought to amplify its glory and might along the Maritime Silk Road, through the epic voyages of Zheng He. 

A towering Ming dynasty eunuch — in some accounts he stands seven feet tall — Zheng He commanded seven expeditions from Asia to the Middle East and Africa. 

When he came ashore on Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) around 1406, his fleet commanded shock and awe: It was a floating city of more than 300 ships and some 30,000 sailors. 

Besides seeking tributes and trade — the ships were laden with silk, gold and porcelain — his mission was to enhance China’s status as the greatest civilization on earth.
After Zheng He’s death at sea in 1433, China turned inward for the next six centuries. 

Now, as the country has become a global power once again, Communist Party leaders have revived the legend of Zheng He to show China’s "peaceful" intentions and its historical connections to the region. 

His goal, they say, was not to conquer but to establish friendly trade and diplomatic relations. 

In Sri Lanka today, Chinese tour groups often traipse through a Colombo museum to see the trilingual stone tablet the admiral brought here — proof, it seems, that China respected all peoples and religions. 

No mention is made of a less savory aspect of Zheng He’s dealings in Ceylon. 

On a later expedition, around 1411, his troops became embroiled in a war. Zheng He prevailed and took the local king back to China as a prisoner.

The unsanitized version of Zheng He’s story may contain a lesson for present-day China about unintended consequences. 

Pushing countries deeper into debt, even inadvertently, may give China leverage in the short run, but it risks losing the good will essential to OBOR’s long-term success. 

For all the big projects China is engaged in around the world — high-speed rail in Laos, a military base in Djibouti, highways in Kenya — arguably its most perilous step so far may be taking control of the foundering Hambantota port. 

“It’s folly to take equity stakes,” says Joshua Eisenman, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“China will have to become further entwined in local politics. And what happens if the country decides to deny a permit or throw them out. Do they retreat? Do they protest?” 

China promotes itself as a new, gentler kind of power, but it’s worth remembering that dredging deepwater ports and laying down railroad ties to secure new trade routes — and then having to defend them from angry locals — was precisely how Britain started down the slippery slope to empire.