A highway cuts through Cambodia's Botum Sakor national park towards the coast - and the Dara Sakor project
The shadowy Chinese firms that own chunks of Cambodia
BBC News
By Lulu Luo & Jonathan Head
in Dara Sokor, Cambodia
The highway runs through the forest like a black ribbon, down to the sea and to what must be one of the world's largest tourism projects.
Fifteen years after it began, there is still not much to see of the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort in southern Cambodia.
It is a grandiose scheme by a Chinese company to build a self-contained tourist city. A Chinese colony, some have called it a venue for "feasting and revelry", according to the company, complete with international airport, deep-sea port, power stations, hospitals, casinos and luxury villas.
The airport is still unfinished. A single casino, with an attached five-star hotel and apartments, sits alone near the sea, fronted by an unmade road, and surrounded by a construction site.
As a tourist business it has barely got started. But it has already had a damaging impact on one of Asia's richest natural environments, and on the thousands of people who live there.
China's economic footprint in Cambodia now dwarfs that of any other country. It provides half of all direct investment and most of its foreign aid.
Cambodia is an enthusiastic partner in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), President Xi Jinping's strategy for expanding Chinese built-and-funded-infrastructure around the world. A lot of this is clearly beneficial. But a great deal of Chinese investment is speculative, rushed and poorly planned.
The once quiet coastal town of Sihanoukville, for example, across the bay from Dara Sakor, was transformed in just a few years into a huge construction site to feed Chinese demand for casinos.
It fuelled a crime wave and then a collapse of the gambling economy during Covid, littering the town with half-built, empty tower blocks. There are good reasons to fear Dara Sakor may suffer similar problems.
"It's like baking without flour," says Sophal Ear, a Cambodian academic at Arizona State University. "You cannot rely on unsustainable practices to achieve sustainable development. What about the Chinese real estate bubble? When China sneezes, Cambodia will catch a cold."
Development, Hun Sen-style
Dara Sakor is the kind of development favoured by Cambodia's former prime minister Hun Sen.
It is on a massive scale, yet it was conceived in almost total secrecy. The BBC has found that there was minimal consultation or evaluation of the human and environmental cost.
The Chinese companies involved provide very little information about themselves, and some have dubious track records. The project has also seeded international suspicion of what other goals China might have in this part of Cambodia.
China's "ask-no-questions" approach to aid and investment appealed to Hun Sen, a self-styled strongman who, after bringing three decades of devastating war and revolution to an end in the 1990s, pushed for breakneck growth to help his country catch up with its neighbours.
But much of this growth has been achieved by giving generous concessions, in particular huge parcels of land, to favoured cronies and foreign companies.
"There are no institutions," says Sebastian Strangio, who has written what is perhaps the definitive book on Hun Sen's Cambodia. "The system relies on keeping powerful people contented."
The Dara Sakor project dates back to early 2008, when UDG, a private Chinese construction company based in the northern city of Tianjin, secured a 99-year lease - the maximum term allowed under Cambodian law - with a single deposit of $1m. This was for the right to develop 36,000 hectares initially, with 9,000 more added later.
UDG was required to pay nothing more for 10 years, and after that only a paltry $1m a year - a breathtakingly generous arrangement for control of one-fifth of Cambodia's entire coastline.
As the land was inside the Botum Sakor national park, and greatly exceeded the legal limit of 10,000 hectares for any one project, it would have been very controversial - had anyone else known about it.
But because there was no information published about the deal at the time, there was no discussion of it in the Cambodian media.
Link to continue reading
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66851049
