Landlocked but offering China an outlet for Thailand and its ports, Laos dreams of being a logistics hub in Southeast Asia. Inaugurated in December 2021, the new Chinese high-speed train is set to facilitate access to the north of the country: it connects, in less than four hours, the capital, Vientiane, to the Chinese border, 422 kilometers to the north, then to Kunming, in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Despite the absence of Chinese tourists, it is the attraction of the moment, and it is full at least from Friday to Monday. Designed on the model of the Chinese TGV, the train, in the red, white and blue colors of the Laos-China Railway Company, runs from Vientiane between the “sugar loaf” mountains of Vang Vieng and crosses the Mekong at Luang Prabang.
We meet Laotians in their Sunday best returning from a wedding in the north of the country with boxes of rice wine – a journey which, by car, would have taken at least two days there and back. Or young people from Muang Xay taking an old father to the hospital in Vientiane. At each of the line’s six stations, locations delimit future business parks of about ten hectares, which Beijing has obtained in concession, to rent them to private companies. The World Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) of the United Nations are financing projects, one to improve the road network near the stations, the other, the marketing of agricultural products.
“Incredible connection”
“The train brings an incredible connection to the Chinese market for Laotian producers: the trucks bring the goods to the freight areas of each of the stations, then it goes to China”, explains Franck Caussin, one of the technical advisers of the IFAD project for the Laotian Ministry of Agriculture. Their prime contractor, the private Chinese group Yunnan Haicheng Industrial, holder of a fifty-year concession, is counting on an influx of Chinese entrepreneurs and traders, expecting 300,000 inhabitants by 2035. In 2019, the he year before the Covid-19 pandemic, the country had welcomed one million Chinese tourists.
This figure should swell, once the borders are opened, by the new railway line and the highway under construction which doubles it, also carried out by a Chinese company and whose first section, between Vientiane and Vang Vieng, was opened at the end of 2020. The same goes for everything that goes with it: hotels, restaurants and shops galore, as well as a growing number of Chinese residents, eager to settle outside China and send their children to school there – an obsession in the empire. middle. The land near the new Vientiane station, about twenty kilometers from the city, is the subject of speculative investment, through Laotian nominees, as foreigners cannot acquire land.
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