Opinion | China’s pan-Asia rail project is on a slow track, and that’s OK

Will Doig says the project’s arduous progress even in a pliable country like Laos reflects the scale of the challenge of this marquee belt and road project. When it comes to international development, China is still moving up the learning curve

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Of the four countries on the pan-Asia Railway’s route – Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore – Laos is the only one in which the project has moved well beyond the planning phase. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 2:00pm, 5 Aug 2018Updated: 7:26pm, 24 Jan 2019

Following years of false starts and delays, China’s efforts to build a pan-Asia railway running the length of the Southeast Asian peninsula are finally beginning to gather steam. Tracks are being laid, bridges are rising, and boring machines are tunnelling through the soft limestone of the Himalayan foothills where China and Southeast Asia meet.

For China, this surely comes as a relief. The pan-Asia railway is as an early test case for the country’s marquee foreign direct investment effort, the Belt and Road Initiative. Its success or failure will speak to whether China can replicate its rail-building prowess abroad. But where the project is finally materialising – and where it is not – should concern Beijing.

Of the four countries on the railway’s route – Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore – Laos is the only one in which the project has moved well beyond the planning phase. In early 2017, I travelled to the Laos-China border region to take stock of the progress. Earthmovers were clearing tracts of land along the railway’s route, scores of Chinese labourers were living in newly-built roadside dormitories, and workers were surveying the rice paddies of Lao subsistence farmers for future clearing and construction.

Since then, the pace of work in Laos has only accelerated. Project managers claim that tunnelling is 20 per cent complete, and over four-fifths of the railway’s land is reportedly under Chinese control.