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Go with the flow

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China says it remains a developing country despite an impressively rapid rise in the league of global power. By some measures, it is now the world's third-biggest economy and second-largest exporter. However gauged, China is clearly a nation with increasing impact and influence, especially if you live in nearby Southeast Asia.

So it comes as no surprise that China is blamed these days for local troubles almost as ritualistically as the United States, the superpower Beijing says it will never emulate. The latest finger pointing at China comes in the wake of devastating floods in parts of northern Thailand and Laos after the Mekong, Southeast Asia's largest river, overflowed its banks, inundating villages and rice fields, and leaving a swathe of destruction.

The water level on August 15 in Vientiane, the capital of Laos on the banks of the Mekong, was the highest since records began in 1913. Low-lying regions in Cambodia and southern Vietnam are bracing for similar damage.

Some Thais hit by the floods, as well as non-governmental organisations campaigning against dam building, say that water released from the reservoirs of three big Chinese dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong swelled the run-off from a tropical storm and heavy monsoon rain across northern Laos and China's Yunnan province earlier this month. But the Mekong River Commission, in a statement last Monday, pointed out that the volume of releasable water held by the three Chinese hydropower dams to generate electricity was too small to have been a significant factor in the flooding. The commission, established by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in 1995 at the end of a long period of conflict in the region, helps co-ordinate management of the Mekong basin in Southeast Asia.

As the world's 12th-longest river, the Mekong runs through or between six countries - China, Myanmar and the four commission member states. Although the Mekong starts high in China's Qinghai-Tibetan plateau and flows through China for more than one-third of its total length of over 4,300km, China is not a commission member. Nor is reclusive Myanmar.

The commission says that the combined storage capacity of the three Chinese dams on the upper section of the Mekong is less than one cubic kilometre. It adds that only a small part of this could have been released as the floodwaters in the area accumulated between August 8, when the tropical storm struck, and August 12, when the flood peak in the Mekong was measured in Chiang Saen, in Thailand.

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