China's leaders care little that their network of dams along the Mekong river poses a threat to its poorer neighbours
downhill, which in much of Asia means they start on the Tibetan plateau before cascading away to the east, west and south. Those steep descents provide the ideal setting for hydropower projects. And since Tibet is part of China, Chinese engineers have been making the most of that potential.
China has every right to do so. Countries lucky enough to control the sources of big rivers often make use of the water for hydropower or irrigation before it sloshes away across a border. Their neighbours downstream, however, are naturally twitchy.
Tension and recrimination have been the order of the day for China and its neighbours, alas. In part, this is because a river like the Mekong does not contain enough water to go round. China has already built 11 dams across the main river and has plans for eight more; the downstream states have built two and are contemplating seven more. Last year, during a drought, the river ran so low that Cambodia had to turn off a big hydropower plant .
China has long resisted any formal commitment to curb its construction of dams or to guarantee downstream countries a minimum allocation of water. It will not even join the Mekong River Commission, a body intended to help riparian countries resolve water-sharing disputes. The problem is not just that China gets huffy about anything that could be construed as foreign interference in its “internal affairs”.
But even if China’s rulers cannot overcome their engineering fetish, they could do plenty more to reassure their neighbours. Sharing data on water levels routinely, without interruption, would be a good start. During a row over a poorly demarcated section of their shared border in 2017, China stopped providing India with information about the flow of the Brahmaputra that is used to provide flood warnings to villagers downstream.
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