Beijing promotes ‘inclusive’ soft power in new Mekong scheme

“Instead, it will follow the open and inclusive region with the aim to complement and achieve coordinated development with the existing cooperation mechanisms, “said Huang Xilian, deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Department.
The LMC, which covers the six riparian states of the Mekong comprising China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, would play a role in promoting other regional and sub-regional cooperation mechanisms, he said.
Foreign ministers of LMC members are convening their third meeting today in the city of Dali to review the progress of cooperation regarding the five-year plan spanning 2018 to 2022.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Cambodian counterpart Prak Sokhon will co-chair the meeting, in which ministers will exchange views on cooperation in the future as well as prepare for the second summit of leaders in Phnom Penh in January.
Established in 2015, the LMC is the latest cooperation scheme in the Mekong basin.
A Chinese scholar said in Beijing earlier that the new scheme could replace the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) effort, since the schemes had many similar functions and overlapping members and areas of cooperation.
While the GMS focuses on infrastructure development, the LMC identified three pillars of cooperation: politics and security; economics and sustainable development; and society, culture and people-to-people exchanges.
Although the LMC is relatively new, the scheme had made a lot of progress in many fields of cooperation, Huang said
Since Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced at the first summit in Sanya last year the establishment of a special LMC fund with US$300 million (Bt9.7 billion) provided over five years, there had been many applications and projects under review and implemented, Huang said.
China has proposed 75 early harvest projects to yield results over the past two years, he said, adding that many academic institutes in China were conducting studies and research in many aspects including environment protection in the Mekong basin. 
Li also pledged an additional $5 billion in loans for production capacity building, allocated to support 11 projects in Mekong countries, he said. There was also a 10-million-yuan (Bt49-million) concession loan to support more than 10 projects, he added.
Of 5,000 training opportunities China was providing to develop human resources in Mekong countries, more than 3,000 have been filled, he said.
The LMC cooperation has generated growth in terms of economic and people-to-people exchanges with trade between China and the other five countries from January to October this year reaching $117.6 billion, an increase of 15.6 per cent year-on-year.
China’s investment in the five countries during the same period was $27 billion, increasing 22.2 per cent year-on-year, he said.
In the first nine months of this year, people-to-people exchanges amounted to 27.8 million trips, including border crossings by local residents who live along the border of China and the Mekong countries.
A total of 15.01 million first-time Chinese travellers chose the Mekong countries last year, which represented an increase of 22.7 per cent, while 12.8 million from the other countries visited China during the same period.
Since the first summit of the LMC in March last year, the number of flights between China and five Mekong countries has increased to 2,562 per week. A total of 332 new airlines opened routes between China and the five countries.