China-Laos railway may be ‘badly needed good news’ for Beijing. And the region?

Name: Chinese company finishes longest tunnel for Indonesia's Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway
Uploaded: 2021-02-27T00:00:22.000Z
Duration: 59 s
Description: Chinese company finishes longest tunnel for Indonesia's Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway

Set to open this year, the link will be watched closely after several Chinese-funded rail projects abroad were viewed as mixed blessings

The Laos route is an important piece in the greater prize of infrastructure access to Southeast Asia

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Laos’ mountainous terrain posed challenges in building the rail link. Photo: Xinhua

Laura Zhou

Published: 8:00am, 27 Feb 2021Updated: 2:15pm, 27 Feb 2021

In southwestern China’s Yunnan province, there is great fanfare around the construction of a mega-railway link to neighbouring Laos, Southeast Asia’s only landlocked country and one of its least developed.

“To build the Sino-Laos Railway as a symbolic project of the Belt and Road [Initiative] and of the friendship between China and Laos,” read huge bright-red banners proclaiming the project’s significance at a construction site near Yuxi, China’s tobacco capital in central Yunnan.

The US$6 billion railway, expected to open in December, has been hailed by China’s state media and state-owned companies as a “strategic docking project” between China’s belt and road infrastructure programme and Laos’ potential to transform from “a landlocked country into a land-linked country”.

Comprising 522km (324 miles) in Yunnan and 414km in Laos, the line will carry freight and passenger trains from Kunming in Yunnan, one of China’s fastest growing regions, to Vientiane, the once sleepy Laotian capital.

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Chinese company finishes longest tunnel for Indonesia's Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway

Already the largest infrastructure project in Laos, the railway is the latest evidence of China expanding its influence in Southeast Asia by transforming transport and trade links across a region that has become the new theatre of the China-US power rivalry.

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