Downstream
Passengers on a high-speed train traveling from Kunming in southern China to Vientiane, Laos, look out of their windows, watching the curated development projects that dot the rail route. Groups of people now travel beyond China’s borders, where the modern communist vision of the future, albeit now modified, takes hold downstream, changing spaces and temporalities in its wake. The current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is known for his rhetoric of how clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of silver and gold. This political slogan centers on environmental policy from a sustainability perspective while inherently foregrounding financial gains. Tunnels burrowed by the newly built high-speed railway from Kunming cut through Laos’ incessantly mountainous territories. The Mekong has also increasingly been blasted as a river to make way for larger ships, and dammed for energy. Over the past twenty years, Thai companies stopped being able to compete with Chinese ones. Now lands are leased for coal and gold mining, watermelon and banana plantations, and sand extraction from the river banks hauled for use in construction sites. To enable the streamlining of movement and work routines, the environment along the Mekong has been reconfigured in the pursuit of capital accumulation.
A new friendship bridge was constructed across the river to streamline cargo transport from China to Thailand; cargo from workers to resources are shipped out of Laos to the production houses in the mainland, and returned as cheap commodities for the masses. A future promising to lift the people out of poverty.
With the construction of a hydro-dam, new metronomes, rhythms, formats, and material patterns are conjured. Huge irrigation networks follow as water is redistributed, reshaping huge landscapes primed for the expansion of plantations. The rhythm of the river’s water release is reconfigured based on energetic demands from distant cities rather than the pulses of seasonal fluxes. Alongside this rhythmic rearrangement, light and darkness highlight the political economic aspects of energy redistribution. Laos remains as one of the darkest countries in the region, despite being the ‘battery of Southeast Asia,’ due to unequal power distribution, while new special economic zones ushered in by the Belt and Road Initiative along the river form as literal concentrations of power and light.
