They're beating their swords into superhighways in Southeast Asia

The grandiose plans for the Asian Highway program mentioned in the article below make the widely criticized and demagogued plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) here in the Lone Star State look like a seal-coat job by comparison.

Perhaps China and Vietnam are really planning to morph themselves into a Southeast Asian Union (SEAU) and use their new superhighway network to bring cheap American products to market throughout the SEAU after we have economically collapsed from China dumping it's US dollar dominated securities and turning to the Euro (and ultimately to the People's Currency, the Renminbi) as hard currency, leaving the United States as a redeveloping country that has become the world's factory (from which the world imports cheap goods and to which it exports pollution). What a reversal of fortune and pay back for the 19th Century exploitation of China by the west that would be! Don't laugh, it might just happen if the US does not reverse course.

In the mean time, I know where China and Vietnam can get some cheap transportation consultants. There may be a number of unemployed or soon to be unemployed transportation consultants here in Texas who will become victims of that great sucking sound of $1.4 billion being siphoned back by Washington (in Indian giving fashion) and of a lack of political will by Texas politicians to take the road less traveled--to do what it takes to meet our own state's Transportation needs in spite of the perceived short-term political fallout.

Asia Pacific

December 14, 2007

For China and Vietnam, a Highway Link Means Speedy Growth

By DONALD GREENLEES

HONG KONG — On a frontier where Vietnamese and Chinese soldiers exchanged bullets in a short but bloody war nearly three decades ago, construction workers from the two countries will soon join forces to build a highway that promises to bring new wealth to their once heavily guarded border regions.

Plans for a four-lane highway from Hanoi to Kunming cleared the last hurdle on Friday when the board of the Asian Development Bank gave the green light to a loan that will underwrite the Vietnamese side of the project.

By 2012, when the highway is supposed to be completed, a journey that now takes three days by truck could take just nine hours. Goods made in China’s Yunnan Province would have quick access to the Vietnamese seaport of Haiphong, and Vietnamese exporters should be able to reach untapped markets in China.

“Both countries are reaping the fruits of peace and cooperation,” said Ayumi Konishi, the Asian Development Bank’s country director in Vietnam. “In one generation, they have moved from tanks and troops to trade and tourism.”

In a meeting Friday in Manila, the bank’s board approved its biggest single-project loan — $1.1 billion — to finance the start of work next year on a 152-mile stretch of the highway from Hanoi to Lao Cai on the border, the bank said in a statement. The Vietnamese government is contributing $100 million to the low-interest loan.

The construction is to add a section to the ambitious Asian Highway program under which 27 Asian countries have pledged to build an 87,000-mile network of roads that meet minimum uniform standards.

The Vietnamese section of the project is to be designated Asian Highway No. 14. It is to link to a highway under construction on the Chinese side of the border at Lao Cai. That area had some of the fiercest fighting in the brief war of 1979, in which the governments of Vietnam and China tested each other’s mettle in a contest for strategic influence in Southeast Asia.

Both are now vastly more interested in markets than in strategic jostling. The highway is one of several projects integrating the economies of northern Vietnam and southern China. It is seen by government and Asian Development Bank officials as a vital spur to the region’s growth, particularly lifting the pace of development in the four poorest provinces of Vietnam.

“I think the integration will be of mutual benefit,” Ho Quang Minh, a director general in Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment, said in a telephone interview from Hanoi. “Southern China is a very big potential market, not just for Vietnam, but for other countries. On the other hand, China can utilize the seaport facilities in northern Vietnam and obtain a shortcut to other countries of Southeast Asia.”

The Vietnamese government has placed a high priority on the development of its northern provinces. The four provinces the highway will cross have poverty rates of up to 34 percent, compared with a national average of 20 percent. The construction of the highway is expected to cut poverty rates significantly.

But that progress will come at some social cost. The road will require the demolition of about 1,900 homes and force the resettlement of some 25,000 people.