Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s outreach to China’s neighbors to the southeast drew a defensive rebuke Friday from the communist power’s foreign ministry.
“We hope that they can play a constructive role in promoting the development of the countries in the subregion instead of creating differences and hurdles,” spokesman Geng Shuang said during a press briefing.
Pompeo, traveling in Singapore, spent much of Friday in a pair of regional diplomatic summits; the U.S.-ASEAN ministerial and the smaller Lower Mekong Initiative Ministerial. The latter pertains to water issues affecting five countries in the Mekong River basin. A flurry of Chinese dam construction upstream have been reportedly “blamed for exacerbating a Southeast Asian drought in 2016” and threatening havoc for local economies.
“The Lower Mekong partner countries are important strategic partners for the United States of America,” Pompeo said during the ministerial. “Our increased engagement in LMI has fueled sustainable development and strengthened ASEAN as an institution … Creating equitable, sustainable, inclusive growth for the subregion not only contributes to ASEAN countries and ASEAN’s centrality, but also to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
The desired U.S. contrast with China remained implicit during Pompeo’s public remarks, but surfaced more obviously when a State Department official was asked if the water-related crises in the sub-region flow from climate change.
“Well, in fact, the Lower Mekong Initiative was founded nine years ago based on the fact that all of these countries have waterfront on the Mekong River but experience the impact of what takes place upstream where the Mekong originates,” the official countered. “The Mekong originates in China, and China has influence on that resource that has impacts downstream, so the countries have to manage some of those impacts.”
Geng took offense at that comment. “The relevant remarks of the U.S. official are groundless and out of ulterior motives,” he said. “China’s hydropower cascade development in the [Mekong] River effectively reduces the water flow during the wet season and increases it during the dry season, which plays an important role in helping the countries downstream prevent flood and drought.”
