It has been reported that just last week China ’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) halted dam construction on the Jinsha River, as the upper reaches of the Yangtze River is called.

Like the Salween and mekong rivers, the Yangtze rises in eastern Tibet. However, unlike the other rivers, the Yangtze flows entirely through China. China’s MEP is obviously concerned at the likely environmental impact additional dams will have on the Yangtze and the Chinese people further downstream who depend on the Yangtze for their livelihood.

Other rivers that rise in or flow though Yunnan, such as the Salween, Irrawaddi, mekong and Red rivers flow through Southeast Asian countries and not China. The Mekong, called the Lanjiang in Yunnan, flows along the Burmese border and through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Chinese government has already completed the construction of four dams on the Lanjiang . They are the Manwan, Da Chaoshan, Jinghong and Xiaowan. An additional four dams are planned - the Gongguoqiao, Nouzhadu, Galanba and Mengsong dams. The total will be eight dams on the upper reaches of the mekong in China’s Yunnan Province.

Of China’s plans for dam construction in Yunnan, Marvin C Ott, professor of national security policy at the US National War College, said the project would to be a boon for China’s geopolitical influence in Southeast Asia, which he believes “is a central Chinese preoccupation for its strategic community”.

“Now, China’s will, preferences, needs and interest become overriding. The mekong River states, and part of the watershed, the river system and so on, are now - almost overnight - in a position where they find themselves with a Chinese sword at their throats.”The sense of China ’s capacity to do dramatic things to your economy, your population, the life of your country, is almost without precedent. I mean, short of a military occupation, this is as strong as influence can get," he said.

Ott described regional geopolitics as being “on the cusp of a major change in China’s favour”.

James Clad, a research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the US National Defence University, said China’s presence and impact, potential and real, on the mekong is “so predominant, so overwhelming, that it does affect, literally, the ability of these countries to continue earning a living in the way that they’ve been accustomed to for millennia”. He called the dams’ construction “probably the most dramatic use of water resources to reorder a geopolitical area that I’ve ever seen.”

Larry M Wortzel, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said that because China is upstream, “it gets the maximum benefits of the mekong and it’s not taking into account the interests of the downstream countries.” Consequently China ’s dam construction “is lowering water levels in Cambodia and Vietnam”. Moreover, he cited concerns in Vietnam that some of the diversion of mekong waters is affecting the fish catches downstream and the water levels in Cambodia and Vietnam, and has already had an economic effect.

China’s MEP is displaying greater concern for its own people who rely on the Yangtze for their livelihood than for the Burmese, Thais, Lao, Cambodians and Vietnamese who rely on the mekong .