Two weeks after being reappointed, Premier Wen Jiabao went to Laos on March 29-31 on his first overseas mission during his second term and attended the Third Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Summit in Vientiane.

Under the theme of "enhancing competitiveness through greater connectivity," leaders of the six countries along the Mekong River recognized the substantial progress of GMS cooperation over the past years. In a joint declaration, they also charted its future course by endorsing a five-year action plan for 2008-12 aimed at spurring growth, reducing poverty, promoting social development and enhancing environmental protection.

Before the summit, Wen paid a brief working visit to Laos where he met his Lao counterpart Bouasone Bouphavanh and Lao President Choummaly Saygnasone. The two nations signed seven agreements on cooperation in the fields of economy, technology, energy and e-government.

Wen attended the GMS Summit on March 31, the day when a grand ceremony was held in Beijing to welcome the Olympic flame and officially start the global Olympic torch relay. This coincidence in a sense testified to the importance China attaches to GMS cooperation, said Shen Shishun, Director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Security and Cooperation at the China Institute of International Studies. "Because all leaders showed great willingness to work together at the summit, it will surely help step up the GMS cooperative process," he said.

With China's participation, GMS cooperation has borne abundant fruit. As China and Southeast Asian nations forge closer ties against the backdrop of regional integration, the GMS mechanism is poised to deliver benefits to all countries in the subregion, Chinese scholars and diplomats said.

The GMS mechanism is one of the best developed cooperative mechanisms between China and the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Shen said. In the context of regional integration and economic globalization, China has gained an advantage over the West in cooperating with ASEAN countries, he said.

China has taken this opportunity to expand its cooperation with ASEAN countries in search of new areas of economic growth, Shen said. Stronger cooperation between China and ASEAN countries has contributed to the development of its southern provinces, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan and Fujian. Unlike Northeast Asia where regional integration has stagnated because of political barriers, Southeast Asian countries have benefited from their cooperation with China over the past years. As they have come to realize that China pursues mutual benefit and win-win progress in the region, they have been showing an ever stronger desire to work with China, Shen said.

GMS cooperation is a telling example of South-South cooperation. It emphasizes pragmatic cooperation in infrastructure development, including the building of roads, railroads, electricity facilities and an information superhighway and the exchanging of development experiences, Shen said.

In addition to encouraging private investment, the governments of the GMS countries have taken greater initiatives to promote GMS cooperation, as evidenced by Wen's proposals at the Vientiane summit, he said.

Wen made a four-point proposal to help enhance the GMS countries' competitiveness:

- Treat each other with sincerity and enhance consultation and mutual trust;

- Step up the development of transportation, power and communications and connect the infrastructure of various countries to support the efforts to upgrade cooperation in the subregion;

- Promote both subregional cooperation and domestic development of individual countries and fully exploit the resources both in and outside the subregion so as to advance cooperation in a well-coordinated manner;

- Strike a balance between economic development and environmental protection, develop resources in a rational way, and place high priority on environmental protection and energy conservation and pollution control so as to ensure the sustainable development of GMS countries' cooperation.

Common benefits

China always sees great value in GMS cooperation, said He Yafei, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, at a press briefing shortly before Wen's trip. It has been an active "advocate, constructor and aid provider" for this program, especially in its major fields such as transportation, energy and telecommunications, he said.

According to an official report on China's participation in GMS cooperation, the country's trade volume with Cambodia was $933 million in 2007, an increase of almost 194 percent over 2006. Its trade with Laos that year reached $249 million, up 218.4 percent from 2006. Its trade with Myanmar was $2.06 billion, a nearly 180 percent increase over the previous year; with Thailand, $34.64 billion for a nearly 200 percent increase from 2006; and with Viet Nam, $15.12 billion for a 224.2-percent increase over the previous year.

The report, jointly issued in late March by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, points out that frequent high-level visits, increasing personnel travels, closer trade and economic connections, more active social and cultural exchanges, and expanding and deepening cooperation in various fields between China and other GMS countries have occurred during the past few years.

According to the report, China had provided 410 million kwh of electricity to Viet Nam through two power lines in its southern power grid by the end of 2007. The China-funded section of the western line of the south-north economic corridor, or the Kunming-Laos-Bangkok Road, in Laos was completed in June 2006, a year ahead of schedule.

At the Third GMS Summit, Wen introduced a package of fresh initiatives to boost cooperation. He pledged some 20 million yuan ($2.9 million) to conduct an engineering feasibility study on the missing link of the eastern route of the proposed Pan-Asian Railway from Kunming to Singapore.

China also would build methane-generating pits for 1,500 rural households in GMS countries, he said. It would provide 1,000 training opportunities for GMS countries within the framework of GMS economic cooperation in the next three years to double the previous number, he said.

China also would increase the number of government scholarships for students from GMS countries by 200 in 2008 to finance their studies at higher learning institutions in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, he said.

Wen announced that China would hold the Second GMS Public Health Forum in 2009. The premier proposed setting up a GMS Economic Corridors Forum to encourage the involvement of cities and enterprises along the corridors. China also would be willing to host the first GMS telecommunications ministers' conference to discuss ways to speed up the development of the subregional information superhighway, he said.

At the same time, Wen committed better protection for the source of the Mekong River and greater consideration for the interests and concerns of the countries in its lower reaches.

It is in the overall interests of all GMS countries to develop the water resources of the Lancangjiang/Mekong River, Assistant Minister He said. As a country in the upper reaches of the river, China would never do anything harmful to the interests of the countries in its lower reaches, he said. While exploiting water resources, China has consulted other countries to address their concerns. China would strengthen its coordination with those countries to reduce and resolve potential problems in harnessing the Mekong River, he said.

Shen said China has increasingly realized the importance of protecting the upper reaches of the Mekong River, which not only is a concern of the countries in the lower reaches of the river, but also has a great bearing on China's ecological development. Because China does not want to harm the interests of lower-reach countries, the problems would be resolved through joint efforts, he said.

The recently released official report says that China is willing to collaborate with all the other GMS countries to bring their cooperation to an ever greater depth, thereby jointly creating a regional environment characterized by "peace and stability, mutual trust and win-win cooperation."

The birth of the GMS The Mekong River is a transnational river in Asia and is 4,880 km long. It originates at the Tanggula Shan Mountain on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, runs through China's Qinghai Province, Tibet Autonomous Region and Yunnan Province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam from north to south, and drains into the South China Sea. The river is known as the Lancangjiang River in China. In response to an Asian Development Bank initiative, the six countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion launched the GMS economic cooperation mechanism in 1992. The first and second GMS summits were held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2002 and Kunming, China, in 2005. The project-oriented GMS cooperation concentrates on nine fields--transport, energy, telecommunications, tourism, the environment, human resources development, agriculture, trade facilitation and private investment.