POLITICS: China Makes Deep Inroads Into Cambodia

• by Antoaneta Bezlova – Newsmekong* (sisophon, cambodia, apr 15 (ips))
• Wednesday, April 15, 2009
• Inter Press Service

'It does cost more than the state school (where tuition is free),' admits Chem, who runs his own eatery in Sisophon. 'But I like the Chinese and I wanted my son to study their language. I hope he can go to China one day.'

It is hard to question the wisdom of Chem’s decision, as the best hospital facility and several clinics in town are also Chinese-run. Chinese money has gone into a couple of language training schools, which take in not only Cambodian Chinese but increasingly ethnic Khmer pupils too.

After a period of prolonged repression, China’s presence in Cambodia is on the rise and traces of this in the impoverished countryside are remarkable. While Japanese and South Korean investors have been pouring money into real estate projects in Cambodia’s up-and-coming capital Phnom Penh, China has sought to combine an influx of state and private investments with a sizable chunk of aid that is now transforming swathes of Cambodia’s hinterland.

'It is remarkable in a way, but it is also a revival of a longstanding tradition of Chinese people providing services to Cambodians. In the old days Chinese merchants were buying and selling Cambodian farmers’ products,' says Lao Mong-hay, a Cambodian-Chinese and former director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy in Phnom Penh.

To Khmer people, China always appeared a faraway giant, Lao muses, and since there was no historical incidence of wars, Cambodians did not harbour negative sentiments toward the Chinese. Animosity was mostly reserved for Cambodia’s more belligerent neighbour to the east - Vietnam.

Yet China has played a sinister and covert role in Cambodia’s turbulent past.

Beijing was a generous and dedicated patron of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime from its inception as a rebel group in the 1960s through its grisly 1975-1978 rule, during which a quarter of Cambodia’s population was killed. This support continued even after Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979, when it continued to survive on the fringes of the traumatised society and operated from jungle camps along the Thai border.

Fearing a Soviet-backed Vietnamese expansion in Indochina, Beijing trained the Khmer Rouge guerrillas and supplied them with arms, food and technical support. According to Lao Mong-hay, who now works as a senior researcher for the Asian Human Rights Commission, China donated at least two billion U.S. dollars to the movement, half of it after Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge and evidence of Pol Pot’s genocidal rule was made public.

Not a single official media outlet in China has reported on the ongoing trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders, which after 30 years of anguished waiting opened in Phnom Penh in late March. Five ageing Khmer Rouge figures are to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity and murder in cases that are supposed to last until 2012.

The most notorious one - Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, is responsible for the torture and killings of up to 14,000 men, women and children under his watch at the Khmer Rouge extermination centre S-21 in Phnom Penh.

'It is misguided to believe that China supported the Khmer Rouge in their internal affairs,' says Zhang Xizhen, South-east Asian researcher at the School of International Studies at Beijing University. 'Premier Zhou Enlai was ill in a hospital and still tried to persuade them not to repeat the mistakes that China had made before, but they did not listen.'

'Although China could not accept what they were doing domestically, it could not interfere directly in their internal affairs,' Zhang says in defence of China’s record. He insists Beijing had no other choice but to support the Khmer Rouge’s foreign policies because they were the only 'force of resistance against Vietnamese expansion in Indochina' and that constituted a 'serious threat to China'.

But numerous records detail that throughout the time that Pol Pot ruled Cambodia, Chinese advisers - perhaps numbering around a thousand - played an important role within the country. They remained important even as, in a twisted irony, the regime’s distaste for ethnic Chinese living in Cambodia soon deteriorated into horrific ethnic cleansing.

Today, even as the Khmer Rouge trials proceed in Phnom Penh, China’s role in Cambodia’s past is mentioned little, if at all.

'The Khmer government never brings up Chinese involvement in Cambodia’s past,' says Ou Virak, president of the Cambodia Centre for Human Rights. 'China is our biggest investor and donor and the number one recipient of land concessions. Both countries want to sweep the past under the carpet.'

According to the Cambodian Investment Committee, China has topped the list of foreign investing countries for the last 14 years, with a total amount of 5.7 billion dollars at the end of 2007. Beijing has promised Phnom Penh an additional 257 million dollars of aid for 2009.

But China’s largesse does not come without strings, asserts Ou Virak.

'The Hun Sen government is acting as Beijing’s spokesperson,' he says, referring to Cambodia’s prime minister. 'They are keen on emphasising America’s role in aiding the Khmer Rouge to seize power because it helps China keep the United States at bay in ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations).'

As part of its Vietnam campaign of the late 1960s up to the early 1970s, the U.S. military bombed Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, leading to many thousands of civilian deaths. The U.S. aggression aided the Khmer Rouge to rally national support in the name of fighting foreign imperialists, and paved the way for its ascent to power. 'Both China and the Untied States are culpable,' says Theary Seng, executive director for the Cambodia Centre for Social Development. 'It is also revisionist on China’s part to try and repudiate its role in the Khmer Rouge because it contradicts historical evidence.'

An apology and a trust fund for Khmer Rouge victims would be an appropriate way for China to close that page of history and make financial amends, she says. 'All these big investments and generous donations - they are all very well but Cambodian people need to be told that they are entitled to them,' Theary Seng adds.

(*This story was written for the Imaging our Mekong Programme coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific)

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement