The Mekong Basin—spanning China upstream and Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam downstream—fits squarely within the “strategic frontier” concept. Nadège Rolland defines a strategic frontier as “a vital space outside of national borders enabling China’s enduring security and prosperity.”¹ This concept encompasses both “visible space”—transboundary hydrological flows; infrastructure corridors of roads, railways, and energy grids; and expanding cross-border trade and mobility—and “invisible space.” The latter is manifest in enduring people-to-people ties, Beijing’s deep relationships with the ruling elites of downstream states, and its expanding ideational and normative projection in the region.

Linked to China’s Yunnan Province through the Lancang River (as the Mekong is known in China), the basin constitutes a natural extension of the country’s periphery, a hinge between China’s own internal frontiers—the remote, mountainous, and less developed Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces—and the Southeast Asian heartland. By tying these provinces into the wider Mekong economic space, Beijing seeks to stimulate growth in its peripheries and reconfigure them into gateways projecting Chinese influence southward. The integration of these regions into trans-Mekong infrastructure corridors—stretching from Kunming and Nanning to Bangkok, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, and beyond—fuses China’s domestic development agenda with its external strategic ambitions, producing an interlinked economic and geopolitical space.

Furthermore, the Mekong Basin carries geopolitical and geoeconomic value as a continental corridor linking China to maritime Southeast Asia and its littoral frontiers. It offers an overland alternative line of strategic communication to mitigate China’s “Malacca dilemma”—the strategic vulnerability arising from its dependence on the Malacca Strait, a chokepoint through which 60% of the country’s oil imports and a substantial portion of its seaborne trade pass. In this sense, the Mekong Basin embodies both China’s quest for strategic depth and its insurance policy against maritime vulnerabilities. To a large extent, this represents history in reverse. In the late nineteenth century, colonial France mounted ambitious but ultimately futile expeditions up the Mekong in search of a navigable artery into China’s markets, only to be thwarted by the river’s treacherous rapids and cascades. Today, it is China that presses southward across the river system. Once a barrier to European imperial designs vis-à-vis China’s interior, the Mekong is now reimagined by Beijing as a strategic conduit providing alternative lanes of communication and commerce toward the sea.

The Mekong Basin qualifies as a strategic frontier in another sense: it has become an increasingly contested space, drawing competing interests and presence from other external powers—notably the United States, Japan, India, and South Korea. Yet unlike the maritime domain of Southeast Asia—where littoral states enjoy geographic buffer from China across the South China Sea and where the United States retains strategic access through its alliance network and naval power projection—the Mekong presents a continental landscape marked by structural asymmetries that increasingly tilt in China’s favor. These asymmetries are structurally shaped by the geography of contiguous borders, the unidirectional cascade flow of the river, and deepening patterns of lower Mekong states’ economic and infrastructural dependence on China.²

The establishment of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) in 2015 has consolidated these asymmetries into an institutional form, marking China’s decisive move to embed its centrality in subregional governance. Proposed by Chinese premier Li Keqiang with the stated goal of promoting socioeconomic development, narrowing development gaps, supporting sustainability, and advancing South-South cooperation, the LMC has evolved into the most expansive and institutionalized mechanism in the subregion.³ Following the inaugural LMC foreign ministers’ meeting in 2015 and the first leaders’ meeting in 2016—at which the Sanya Declaration was adopted as the grouping’s foundational document—the LMC has constructed a vertically integrated architecture, spanning the leaders’ summit, ministerial and senior officials’ meetings, and issue-specific working groups. In terms of scope, scale, and financing, the LMC has outpaced parallel Mekong mechanisms, enabling Beijing to consolidate its influence under a multilateral veneer while consolidating its strategic primacy in the subregion.

This essay analyzes the LMC through the conceptual lens of asymmetrical relationships to better understand the mechanisms and implications of China’s Mekong strategy. Asymmetry is an enduring feature in China’s relationships with the other Mekong countries, shaped fundamentally by the preponderance of Chinese power and resources. As noted by Brantly Womack, asymmetry should be viewed as “a normal condition rather than as a disequilibrium” in China’s historical relationship with the rest of Asia.⁴ China’s contemporary leverage in the Mekong is a continuation of this historical pattern. Its power disparity vis-à-vis lower Mekong states today is not only material but also institutionalized through the LMC. While the mechanism exhibits the formal characteristics of an intergovernmental framework, such as consensual decision-making and equal representation, it embeds and accentuates asymmetry through China’s dominant role in institutional design, resource provision, and agenda- and norm-setting.

The Genesis of the LMC

Before the advent of the LMC, the Mekong Basin was already a crowded landscape of subregional mechanisms with different compositions, mandates, and priorities.⁵ Among the indigenous frameworks, the Mekong River Commission (MRC) stood out as the principal body for transboundary water governance, bringing together the lower Mekong countries—Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand—to jointly manage the river’s resources. China, while a major upstream state, opted for observer status rather than becoming a signatory to the 1995 Mekong Agreement that is the legal treaty underpinning the MRC. As a result, Beijing is not bound by the MRC’s procedural obligations to notify or consult downstream countries over mainstream dam construction or water regulation on the Lancang. This approach reflects a broader pattern in China’s transboundary water governance, which prioritizes sovereignty and upstream prerogatives over legally binding basin-wide rules, thereby preserving its strategic flexibility as the “upstream hegemon.”⁶

Among external actors, Japan stepped in early as a key economic player in the subregion after the Cold War, leveraging its economic strength through the Asian Development Bank to launch the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Cooperation Program in 1992, involving all six Mekong riparian states—including China, primarily through Yunnan Province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.⁷ The GMS supported economic integration across such sectors as agriculture, energy, environment, health, human resource development, information and communications technology, tourism, transportation, trade facilitation, and urban development. Japan later upgraded its engagement to the annual Japan-Mekong Summit in 2009. The Republic of Korea (ROK)—another rising economic player—followed with the establishment of the Mekong-ROK Cooperation in 2011. Although India is not a Mekong riparian state, it is a contiguous nation with historical, civilizational, and geographic linkages to the subregion. India shares a land border with Myanmar and draws on the same Himalayan watershed system that nourishes many of Asia’s great rivers, including the Brahmaputra and the Ganges. These hydrological interconnections give the country a significant stake in the subregion’s development and transboundary water governance, as reflected in its early engagement through the launch of the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation in 2000.

Despite the United States’ status as the global hegemon with broad influence across Asia, U.S. engagement in the Mekong Basin remained peripheral in the two decades following the Cold War. It was characterized more by episodic humanitarian aid and normative advocacy for democracy and human rights than by sustained strategic focus. Washington did not formalize a subregional approach until 2009 through the Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI).⁸ U.S. engagement through the LMI encompasses both annual foreign minister exchanges and program-based initiatives, aiming to deliver technical assistance, foster human development, and empower marginalized groups in the subregion, with a focus on water management, environmental protection, education, and health. As U.S.-China strategic competition intensified, Washington’s engagement in the Mekong acquired a sharper geopolitical edge, starting from the first Trump administration. The LMI was elevated into the Mekong-U.S. Partnership with a view to becoming “more strategic, focused, and effective.”⁹ Then secretary of state Mike Pompeo, alongside many senior U.S. diplomats, stepped up their criticisms of Chinese upstream behavior.¹⁰

Despite its growing economic footprint and expanding regional influence, China had been cautious in Mekong institution building until the launch of the LMC in 2015. Beijing traditionally favored bilateral channels and engaged selectively as a partner of some subregional mechanisms such as the GMS, MRC, and Thailand-led Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy. The LMC’s establishment thus marked an inflection point in Beijing’s regional strategy, signaling a shift toward more proactive institutional leadership in mainland Southeast Asia.

On the one hand, the LMC represents a natural outgrowth of China’s economic predominance in the Mekong—being the subregion’s largest trading partner, leading foreign investor, and primary infrastructure financier. On the other hand, this evolution takes place within the broader transformation in Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping. Shortly after assuming power, he convened the 2013 Work Conference on Neighborhood Diplomacy, elevating the strategic importance of the periphery in China’s foreign policy. Xi also introduced the “three-dimensional perspective” to China’s neighborhood engagement—namely, top-level design and strategic planning, official-level exchanges, and people-to-people connections.¹¹ His directives—stabilizing the periphery by effectively managing areas of dispute or disagreement to mitigate external intervention; accelerating connectivity through infrastructure development by making use of “China’s advantages in economy, trade, technology, and finance”; advancing subregional security cooperation; and shaping favorable regional narratives through public diplomacy and shared destiny discourse¹² —laid the conceptual and strategic foundation for the LMC. It has since become an operational embodiment of China’s neighborhood diplomacy activism and an institutional vehicle for recentering China in subregional governance.

How the LMC Consolidates a Sino-Centric Order in the Mekong Basin

The LMC’s Sino-centric institutional design. Structured as an intergovernmental mechanism, the LMC includes a biennial leaders’ summit, annual foreign ministers’ meetings, and a range of senior officials’ consultations and technical working groups, which adopt joint statements, multiyear action plans, and functional cooperation programs. Having no permanent secretariat, the LMC operates under rotational co-chairmanships, with China serving as the co-chair alongside a rotating lower Mekong state that assumes hosting duties for high-level meetings and coordination responsibilities. The national focal points are housed within the member countries’ foreign ministries.

The LMC’s agenda is organized around three pillars—(1) political and security cooperation, (2) economic and sustainable development, and (3) sociocultural and people-to-people exchanges—and five priority areas—(1) connectivity, (2) production capacity, (3) cross-border economic cooperation, (4) water resources management, and (5) agriculture and poverty alleviation. Although management of water resources is on its agenda, the LMC is not a riverine governance platform. As discussed earlier, China exerts its sovereignty and jurisdiction over water resources of all international watercourses in its territory, including the Mekong, refusing to be bound by global or regional transboundary water governance regimes.

Notwithstanding these intergovernmental features, the LMC’s institutional design enables China to shape the parameters of regional engagement in a hub-and-spoke fashion, based on Chinese patronage, control over upstream resources, and top-down direction of subregional relations. For instance, the LMC China Secretariat’s website effectively functions as the primary online portal for the LMC, hosting archives of official documents as well as updates on its activities and projects.¹³

The financing vehicle for the LMC development cooperation is the LMC Special Fund of $300 million in Chinese concessional loans. It is administered by China to support small and medium-sized projects proposed by the lower Mekong countries. Yearly project priorities are set by China’s foreign ministry, and Chinese officials approve projects. Disbursements are executed through bilateral agreements, effectively embedding a patron-client relationship between China and lower Mekong states.¹⁴ In this regard, the LMC reflects a feature common to other Mekong mechanisms involving external powers—namely, a donor-recipient dynamic in which the external actor serves as both financier and technical provider. Similar modalities are found in Japan’s engagement through the Asian Development Bank and South Korea’s support via the Mekong-ROK Cooperation Fund.

A notable feature of the LMC’s institutional design is the integration of a multilateral-bilateral nexus, where bilateral sub-mechanisms are embedded within the broader regional framework. This setup allows China to engage the five lower Mekong countries both collectively and individually, resembling a hub-and-spoke model. Reflecting this, the LMC website functions not only as the information hub for the LMC but also as the online portal for China’s bilateral relations with lower Mekong states. Disbursements from the LMC Cooperation Fund are channeled through bilateral agreements, enabling more flexible and targeted project implementation in individual Mekong countries.

China’s central role in the LMC is further underscored by its hosting of cooperation centers that serve as implementing bodies for many LMC initiatives. These include the Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation Center, Environmental Cooperation Center, Agricultural Cooperation Center, Youth Exchange Cooperation Center, Vocational Education Training Center, and Global Center for Mekong Studies, all headquartered in Yunnan. Through these institutions, which function as the operational arm of the LMC in functional cooperation, China wields substantial logistical and administrative influence while guiding the cooperative agenda toward its state-led, economic-focused model.

China’s approach to Mekong water governance. What sets the LMC apart from the Mekong mechanisms involving other external powers is China’s dual primacy as both the dominant economic actor and the upstream state controlling the Mekong’s headwaters. China’s “man must conquer nature” mindset, embedded in its historical taming of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers for agriculture and flood control, combined with its modern advanced hydrological engineering, has shaped its interventionist approach to the Mekong’s water resources for decades. This includes leveraging the water cascade for dam building, regulating the flows to moderate floods and droughts, or blasting the rapids for navigation. To date, China has constructed 12 mainstream dams and 95 tributary dams along the Lancang and is the largest financier of energy infrastructure across the Mekong Basin, with a predominant focus on hydropower.¹⁵

Such extensive exploitation of Mekong water resources—and the environmental consequences for downstream communities—has triggered mounting concerns in the lower Mekong states as well as growing international scrutiny. The cumulative impacts include prolonged droughts, erratic water flows, sediment loss, declining fish stocks and biodiversity, and cascading effects on food security, local livelihoods, and displaced communities whose survival is closely tied to the river’s natural rhythms.¹⁶

Among the lower Mekong states, Vietnam has been most outspoken about its concerns over upstream dam construction, given the stakes for its Mekong delta, which contributes over 50% of the country’s rice production, 70% of its fruit, and 60% of its aquaculture output. Chinese dams have already captured roughly 30% of sediment that would otherwise reach the delta. This has eroded soil fertility, accelerated coastline retreat, and increased salinization in the delta, where the Mekong flows into the South China Sea. Dam-related disruption is expected to reduce Vietnam’s fish catch by 30% by 2040.¹⁷ In neighboring Cambodia, fish populations in Tonlé Sap—a lake that provides 60%–70% of the Cambodian population’s protein intake—have fallen significantly, with catches declining and fish sizes shrinking. Hydropower dams, alongside sand mining and climate change, are among the primary drivers.¹⁸ The Cambodian government, however, has been rather restrained in expressing the concerns. Instead, it has prioritized maintaining a friendly relationship with China, which is Cambodia’s most important political ally and economic partner.

Many local and international environmental advocacy groups have been at the forefront of documenting degradation of the Mekong Basin’s river system and advocating for its protection.¹⁹ Thai-based organizations such as the Living River Association and Chiang Khong Conservation Group, alongside international bodies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and International Rivers, have actively raised awareness about multiple threats to the river: mainstream dam construction, agricultural and industrial pollution, destructive fishing practices, and climate change impacts. The United States and several U.S. allies—including Australia, Japan, and some European states—have provided financial and technical support to these grassroot and international environmental advocacy networks as well as research institutions to enhance transparency on Mekong water resources management. These efforts include documenting correlations between Chinese dam operations and irregular water flows, drought conditions during critical farming seasons, and ecosystem disruption.²⁰ The United States has leveraged these concerns strategically by portraying China’s upstream dams as emblematic of irresponsible behavior and disregard for regional sustainability. This framing has enabled Washington to integrate the Mekong Basin into its broader strategic contest with China over norms, influence, and models of governance in mainland Southeast Asia.²¹

In response, China has instrumentalized the LMC to both counter these criticisms and co-opt downstream countries toward endorsing its state-led, economic-focused approach to water governance, including the legitimation of its extensive Lancang dam-building. Beijing has pursued a strategy of de-securitization of water issues through the LMC. In the first place, it has embedded a state-centric orientation within the mechanism with commitments to “top-level design” and “strengthened policy dialogue” among member governments on how to utilize the water resources. This, in effect, has limited the participation of local communities and civil-society groups, which are the most vocal about the ecological consequences of hydropower development and its impact on downstream livelihoods. All LMC activities—including those involving nonofficial actors such as journalists, students, youth, academics, and media—are coordinated through intergovernmental channels, over which China, as the principal sponsor and organizer, wields influence in shaping both the process and the narrative outcomes.²²

China also seeks to reshape the discourse on subregional water cooperation by foregrounding economic development, regional connectivity, and mutual benefit as the LMC’s core agenda. This framing shifts attention away from the environmental and political sensitivities surrounding upstream dam-building, recasting the Mekong as a site of shared growth rather than contested governance. In effect, this reflects a transformation strategy of “moving issues off the security agenda” and “back into the realm of normal politics,” placing the LMC’s water resource cooperation within a broad and cross-cutting framework. The range of issues encompassed include water resources and green development, climate change adaptation, water infrastructure, agricultural water use, sustainable hydropower development and the water-food-energy nexus, water information sharing, and coordination with other areas such as agriculture, fishery, tourism, health, and poverty reduction.²³

By adopting this expansive and economic-focused framing, the LMC diffuses and de-escalates scrutiny of dam building—the most contentious dimension of Mekong water governance—while reinforcing China’s preferred narrative of cooperative, win-win engagement. The LMC’s normative commitment to sustainable water governance is therefore largely performative inasmuch as it lacks enforceable legal instruments, independent monitoring mechanisms, and equal decision-making rights for downstream countries.

The Chinese narrative about the Lancang dams. The LMC has also become an enabler for China to promote “wonderful stories“ about its Lancang dams, aligning with Xi Jinping’s 2013 directive to “tell China’s story well.”²⁴ This campaign seeks to reshape international public opinion about China by projecting carefully curated narratives that emphasize Chinese benevolence, development contributions, and win-win cooperation, while deflecting criticism and countering what Beijing perceives as Western-dominated discourse. In the Mekong context, this translates into highlighting the purported benefits of Chinese dams, such as flood control, electricity generation, and regional connectivity, while downplaying or dismissing concerns about environmental degradation and downstream impacts.

In 2022, I conducted a content analysis of the now-defunct Lancang-Mekong Water Resources Cooperation Information Sharing Platform—a China-administered website set up to share daily hydrological data from the country’s Yunjinghong and Man’an hydropower plants.²⁵ The findings showed that the platform consistently downplayed the dams’ environmental costs while amplifying their benefits. The dominant storyline portrayed Chinese dams as providers of regional public goods by “regulating floods and replenishing droughts” for downstream states. This framing of Chinese dams as benevolent, even altruistic, has been consistently echoed by Chinese leaders, experts, and hydropower companies. To its credit, China did release water from the Yunjinghong dam in March–April 2016 at Vietnam’s request to mitigate droughts downstream. But such an act does not necessarily indicate that altruism guides Chinese dam operations either in principle or in practice. The emphasis on water-level regulation obscures less favorable impacts—most notably the reduced sediment flow from upstream, which has led to declining fisheries and food security risks downstream, as documented by the MRC and independent experts.²⁶

Through the LMC, China has sponsored research and organized study tours, exchanges, and visits for officials, youth, and media from downstream states, setting the stage for their reported appreciation of China’s water governance and upstream dams. In 2022, for instance, Mekong diplomats and students visited Lancang dams and were quoted as acknowledging “the importance of water infrastructures in mitigating droughts and floods” and recognizing “Chinese efforts to ecological and environmental protection while developing hydropower.”²⁷ Similarly, the LMC website features an article on a survey of the Lancang River’s source in 2024. A Cambodian hydrologist from the MRC Secretariat is quoted as stressing “the significance of China’s hydropower projects in the Lancang River” and noting that, while the Lancang is not well suited for agriculture, it “holds immense potential for hydropower development.” This framing sidesteps the fact that the downstream Mekong is of vital importance for agriculture and food security in countries like Cambodia. The article also cites a Lao National Mekong Committee official who reportedly shifted from “initial skepticism” to endorsing the importance of Chinese hydropower after joining the survey.²⁸ Such examples abound on the LMC website, attesting to China’s concerted effort to co-opt foreign voices into its broader discourse campaign of “using international friends for international propaganda.”²⁹

Conclusion

The LMC is not a riverine governance platform, although the management of water resources is on its agenda. Viewed through the lens of order building, the LMC represents a template of China’s statecraft in mainland Southeast Asia, illustrating the country’s rising role as a subregional institutional architect. The grouping demonstrates how China has designed and leveraged the mechanism to outcompete other platforms by rival powers, institutionalize its hydro-hegemony over downstream states, legitimize its state-led and economic-focused approach to Mekong water governance, and entrench its strategic centrality in the subregion under the “Lancang-Mekong community with a shared future” banner.³⁰

While the substantive dynamics of Chinese influence lie in bilateral economic and political engagements, the LMC functions as the institutional vehicle through which these asymmetries are projected into a hierarchical order where Chinese interests prevail not through overt coercion but through a calibrated blend of patronage, structural dependency, and sustained relationship cultivation. The LMC also consolidates China’s role as a normative entrepreneur shaping the terms of subregional cooperation, from transboundary water use to broader economic priorities.

The downstream Mekong states approach China with varying interests and sensitivities, yet all participate in the LMC out of pragmatism. Laos, heavily invested in hydropower, is aligned with China’s dam-building agenda. Vietnam, furthest downstream, is most concerned about the dams’ impacts and has sought to internationalize the Mekong issue. Cambodia has muted criticism to safeguard its broader ties with Beijing. Thailand, hampered by chronic political instability, has struggled to sustain its homegrown Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy but has nonetheless adapted to the LMC framework. A key advantage for China lies in its cultivated ties with ruling elites across the subregion—regardless of who holds power—while its emphasis on infrastructure resonates with the prevailing political-economic priorities of lower Mekong governments and their corporate affiliates.

Yet despite these narrative and diplomatic gains for Beijing, the LMC’s broader regional impact has been more performative than transformative. This stems from its very design: the LMC entrenches the “hub”—China—while doing little to foster horizontal linkages among the “spokes.” In some cases, it has even sharpened frictions between them. The Vietnam-Cambodia controversy over the Funan Techo Canal demonstrates how Chinese-backed infrastructure projects can generate zero-sum perceptions and resource competition among downstream states. The 180-kilometer channel, which will be funded and built by the state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation, will harness the Mekong water to forge a direct shipping route from Phnom Penh to the sea. The project has raised concerns in Vietnam about significant environmental impacts, including altered water flows and potential damage to the Mekong delta’s fragile ecosystem.

Such outcomes sit uneasily with Beijing’s framing of the LMC as embodying a “community of shared future”—a concept that rhetorically emphasizes common prosperity and mutual benefit. In practice, this vision functions less as a blueprint for genuine community-building and regional governance than as a legitimizing discourse for a hierarchical order centered on Chinese preferences and capabilities.

Furthermore, order building ultimately requires the capacity to engage on security issues, including intraregional disputes—something that lies beyond the LMC’s remit.³¹ When the Thailand-Cambodia border clashes broke out in July 2025, Beijing—despite its outsized economic leverage and privileged access to both governments—apparently played a marginal role in de-escalating the conflict. The ceasefire was instead secured through diplomacy by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and tariff threats by President Donald Trump.³² What remains absent is the connective tissue required for collective governance and effective crisis management. In this respect, China’s statecraft in mainland Southeast Asia remains on a learning curve.

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Hoang Thi Ha is Senior Fellow and Co-coordinator of the Regional Strategic and Political Studies Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

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IMAGE CREDITS

Banner illustration by Nate Christenson ©The National Bureau of Asian Research.

 

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