Could This Be China's Panama Canal?

Lyle J. Goldstein

Security, Asia

China weighs a big dig in Thailand.

President Obama’s trip to Vietnam was ostensibly focused on the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it is quite certain that the visit had a powerful subtext: strengthening the partnership between Washington and Hanoi to offset Beijing’s aggressive approach to the South China Sea. The Chinese reef reclamation projects resulted in shiny, new and large airstrips coupled apparently with deep water berths for ships have set the whole region on edge.

Two years ago, a crisis occurred between China and Vietnam that whose significance is reminiscent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The China-Vietnam crisis was comprised of hundreds of paramilitary vessels, a rising superpower’s untested leader, and plenty of nationalist bile on both sides. Both liberal internationalists and bellicose realists are looking forward in the coming months to resolution of the arbitration in the Hague brought by the Philippines against China, but it is far from clear that this legal ruling will calm the turbulent waters of the South China Sea. However, readers may also consider the possibility that all the above theatrics could well be a sideshow for the main act.

A spate of articles appeared in late 2015 in Chinese that discussed in reasonably detailed terms the opportunity to build the long anticipated canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand. It seems widely held among Chinese sources that the project may “become an international golden waterway” [成为国际黄金水道]. If built, the new canal could have a major impact on both the commercial and strategic landscape of the entire region. At a minimum, the canal could move the locus of dynamic regional and global maritime trade hundreds of miles to the north, but it could also serve as a major enabler for China’s ambitious “one belt, one road” [一带一路] strategy as well. This edition of Dragon Eye will examine some Chinese perspectives on this possibility.