YUNNAN'S ROCKY INTERNATIONAL ROADS HAMPER ACCESS TO SE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 CHENGDU 000069 SIPDIS STATE FOR EAP/CM AND EB E.O. 12958: DECL: 4/21/2034 TAGS: ECON ASEC PGOV SUBJECT: YUNNAN'S ROCKY INTERNATIONAL ROADS HAMPER ACCESS TO SE ASIA CHENGDU 00000069 001.2 OF 004 CLASSIFIED BY: David Cowhig, Acting Consul General, U.S. Consulate General Chengdu. REASON: 1.4 (b) ¶1. (C) Summary: Road links from Southwest China's Sichuan province through Yunnan Province to Southeast Asia have not yet developed to the point where motorists can count on these highways for safe and reliable passage south. Problems of highway finance in Yunnan Province, corruption, poor workmanship, and protectionism are the main impediments to safer and better roads through Sichuan and Yunnan to Southeast Asia. These problems with the highways through Sichuan and Yunnan provinces to Southeast Asia illustrate difficulties in interprovincial cooperation and the far-reaching implications of Yunnan Province's 2006 decision to privatize highway construction. End summary. Road Travel to Southeast Asia For Evacuation or Commerce Difficult -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶2. (C) Residents of Southwest China's Sichuan Province would, at best, find it difficult and dangerous to travel south through Yunnan province and in to Southeast Asia, based on the current condition of roads leading south from Chengdu. The Consulate's Regional Security Officer (RSO) recently attempted to drive from Chengdu - Kunming to survey potential evacuation routes. Officials from the Thai Consulate General had previously travelled from Chengdu to Kunming, and reported relatively good road conditions. In contrast to this report, RSO found that the most plausible route for an evacuation, using an expressway completed at different times over the last 10 years, had significant physical limitations. ¶3. (SBU) RSO found most of the road leading from Chengdu to the northern border of Yunnan to be in relatively good condition, although one short section of the road had deteriorated to a rough dirt road-like condition. Once across the Yunnan border, road quality appeared noticeably lower. The four lane divided highway, two lanes northbound and two lanes southbound, snaked through steep canyons. Poorly marked construction zones posed a danger to drivers on the highway, and RSO noted that there were very few opportunities for vehicles to exit the highway and travel on secondary roads if the highway were blocked by an 
accident or landslide. Pedestrians from local villages walking along the highway (perhaps the only convenient road in the area) and few street lamps to illuminate the road at night added even more potential danger to this stretch of road. Foreign Affairs Office [FAO] officials from Huize, a town north of Yunnan's capital Kunming, even told RSO that they would not be permitted to drive north along the road during the evening because it was too dangerous. Financial Problems, Protectionism and Corruption Led To Poor Roads -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶4. (SBU) The roads in southwest China have deteriorated rapidly due to Yunnan's problems in financing its highways, Yunnan Province protectionism, and apparently in both Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, poor workmanship and corruption. A road engineer who has been living in Chengdu since 1990 and working on road projects in China and Southeast Asia for more than twenty years told Congenoff that the entire length of highway from Chengdu to Kunming was less than 10 years old. He described the roads in Sichuan and Yunnan as a "coming disaster" and said that the particularly decrepit section of road in Sichuan leading south was built less than six years ago. The Sichuan government probably would not rebuild this road, electing instead to build new roads, according to the engineer. Sichuan's five year plan calls for the construction of 12,400 miles of new road, roughly doubling the total miles of road in the province. The engineer said that Sichuan had once ranked sixth among China's provinces for total miles of road, but had now fallen to sixteenth place. He said that the provincial government has a strong incentive to build new roads, but not necessarily to maintain existing roads. Moreover, some of the new roads will be seldom used, while others will exceed design capacity as soon as they are opened. CHENGDU 00000069 002.2 OF 004 Many Repairs Needed Soon After Road Completion -------------- ¶5. (SBU) Poor workmanship also contributes to the poor road conditions. The engineer said that as soon as roads were finished, major repair work often needed to begin on the roads. A separate contact in Yunnan told Congenoff in 2008 that many of the tunnels along the recently completed route from Kunming to the Laos border already need to be rebuilt due to poor initial build quality. Inexperienced or poorly qualified project managers bear much of the responsibility for the quality problems, according to the engineer. He said that roads built with funding from the Asia Development Bank tend to be higher quality because outside funding for the projects helps to attract more talented project managers. Officials Suspect Protectionism Behind Yunnan Road Deterioration -------------- -------------- ¶6. (C) Corruption may also contribute to the poor quality of roads or the decision to build roads along lightly-travelled routes, while provincial level protectionism is further hindering development of roads linking Sichuan with Kunming and the sixteen roads linking Yunnan Province to various points in Southeast Asia. The Thai Consul General speculated that the deterioration of roads in Yunnan is the result of corruption. The Sichuan Foreign Affairs Office (FAO) told the Consul General that the Yunnan government was hindering the development of roads linking Sichuan with Kunming and Southeast Asia. The officials said that the Sichuan government has raised the issue with Yunnan officials, but Yunnan appears to want to keep Southeast Asian markets for themselves. The engineer similarly suggested that Yunnan did not want more links with the province to the north. Yunnan Highway Construction Privatization Led To Financial Problems -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶7. (SBU) Financial difficulties, corruption and poor design are among the problems discussed in "Yunnan's Disappointing International Highways" an article which appeared in the April 8, 2009 issue of Guangzhou-based periodical Nanfeng Chuang. In 2006, Yunnan transferred responsibility for highway construction from the Yunnan Province Transportation Bureau to a private corporation, Yunnan Province Highway Development and Investment Corporation Ltd [Yunnan sheng gonglu fazhan touzi youxian ziren gongsi]. Banks are much less willing to lend money to this private corporation than they were to Yunnan Province, so Yunnan province highway construction has been chronically starved of needed construction funds. More details are in the summary translation of the Nanfeng Chuang article appended to this cable. The Yunnan provincial press has also reported on corruption investigations within the provincial transportation bureau. Chengdu RSO Noted Restrictions on Travel and Toll Booth Chokepoints -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶8. (C) Chengdu RSO noted that traffic on and off Southwest China's highway system is easily monitored and controlled through a series of toll booths. This enables provincial authorities to restrict access to groups or individuals on short notice, as they did when RSO attempted to drive to Kunming. RSO observed employees at the toll booths use what appeared to be handheld radios immediate after the Consulate vehicle passed through the toll gate. RSO's vehicle was intercepted by a police checkpoint on the highway, which happened to be staffed by officers from the Foreign Affairs section of the county CHENGDU 00000069 003.2 OF 004 Public Security Bureau (PSB). RSO was subsequently restricted from travelling any further south on the road, an action he assesses the PSB could easily take toward other targeted groups travelling on the highway. Note: Congenoff recently noticed an armed security official at a toll both on another highway, suggesting that the use of toll booths as access control chokepoints may be common. ¶9. (C) Local PSB and Foreign Affairs officials also seem to be able to coordinate interprovincial action, with relatively little notice, to control the movement of targeted individuals. After RSO was denied passage south and allowed to return to Chengdu, he noticed that he was followed by marked and unmarked security vehicles for the entire return journey. RSO's local investigative assistant speculated that Yunnan Province probably would not have coordinated directly with Sichuan Province, but instead would have coordinated with Beijing officials who in turn would have directed Sichuan to act. [Comment: The difficulties of interprovincial PSB coordination seem to neatly parallel the difficulties of Sichuan - Yunnan provincial cooperation. End comment] Sichuan FAO officials told the Consul General after RSO's return that Consulate personnel were prohibited from driving Consulate vehicles to Yunnan without permission. Comment: The Difficulties of Inter-Provincial Cooperation -------------- -------------- ¶10. (C ) The economic, management and engineering problems of Sichuan and Yunnan Provincial highway connections to Southeast Asia are overlaid with additional layers of problems of protectionism, politics and inter-provincial coordination. The difficulties of interprovincial coordination in highway construction were neatly paralleled by the apparent necessity for the Yunnan PSB to talk to the Sichuan PSB to continue the shadowing of the Consulate Chengdu car back to Chengdu. The extraordinary autonomy and lack of oversight that local and provincial department leaders enjoy continues to have serious consequences for southwest China. -------------- -------------- -------------- APPENDIX: Summary translation of the article "Yunnan's Disappointing International Highways" which appeared in the April 8, 2009 issue of the Guangzhou-based magazine Nanfeng Chuang is appended below BEGIN SUMMARY TRANSLATION - ENTIRE TEXT UNCLASSIFIED Funding shortfalls owing to corruption and the transfer of the responsibility for constructing highways from the Yunnan Provincial Highway Bureau to a private corporation to which banks are reluctant to lend, has led to incidents of unpaid workers blocking highways and the deferral of needed highway construction and repairs. According to the article, the new Yunnan province portions of the Kunming - Thailand highway were poorly planned, resulting in killer intersections and severe local obstacles for trade and transportation since few bridges or pedestrian overpasses or underpasses were built. For three weeks after the opening of the Kunming to Bangkok highway, several sections of the Yunnan portion were blocked by workers protesting non-payment of their wages. Banks are much less willing to lend money for highway construction after the May 2006 transfer of highway construction responsibility from the Yunnan Provincial Transportation Bureau to the Yunnan Province Highway Development and Investment Corporation Ltd [Yunnan sheng gonglu fazhan touzi youxian ziren gongsi]. The reluctance of the banks to lend money to the new highway company has made it much more difficult for the company to pay for construction work on time and to pay workers their wages on over ten highway projects. By the time of workers blocked parts CHENGDU 00000069 004.2 OF 004 of the Xiaoma highway on the Kunming - Bangkok route in March 2008, the highway company was 2 billion RMB (USD 300 million) behind in payments to contractors for that highway project. After the highway construction guidance office persuaded the 12th Railroad Bureau to send personnel and 49 million RMB for the workers, did the workers stop blocking the highways after 20 days of protests. The Xiaoma highway project portion of the Kunming - Bangkok highway, originally planned for end of 2007, was not ready until June 2008. Poor road planning and construction however led to a spate of fatal road accidents along the highway, angering local peasants and minority people. This led to more protesters blocking the highway. However, reports Nangfeng Chuang, authorities quickly put an end to the protests and redid the roadway to make it safer, since this was Olympic time and Yunnan feared being responsible for hurting China's image abroad. In March 2009, the Nanfeng Chuang journalist traveled on the Xiaoma portion of the highway and found that the promised pedestrian overpasses where pedestrians were being killed had still not been built. A few lines later, the article quotes highway officials claiming that the many overpasses and safety improvements at intersections had been built.. The Yunnan Province Highway Development and Investment Corporation is still 1.4 billion RMB behind in payments to its contractors, noted the April 2009 article. More troubling for the company is the central government's order that collection of tolls on secondary highways end. The Xiaoma highway is slated to be one of the first to be required to stop collecting tolls. According to the Nanfeng Chuang report, similar problems are to be found on other Yunnan highways. On the Xinjie to Mengzi portion of the Yunnan highway leading to Hanoi, the highway was blocked by people in highway uniforms who claimed the road was closed because some signs had not yet been installed. The Xinje - Mengzi portion of the highway (originally planned to open in April 2009) has caused many problems. In September 2007, 20 Sichuan women organized the "wives' get-back-wages brigade" (taitai taoxindui) to claim over RMB 200 million (USD 30 million) in back wages from the highway company. They were beaten up, but caught the attention of the media, so their dispute with the highway company was resolved. One source told the journalist "because the project funds aren't coming in, construction contractors are dragging their feet and we have no idea when work will be completed. Moreover, in many cases agreement has not been reached with local peasants on compensation for land being taken, some peasants are being paid while others are only getting partial payment. Sometimes the company pays someone impersonating the peasant whom they should pay." Frequently a few peasants or up to several hundred peasants block the highway. The Nanfeng Chuang article quoting a traveler who reported that the section of the Kunming - Bangkok highway that runs through Laos is poorly maintained and deteriorating. Moreover the river bridge planned to replace the ferry boat at the Laos - Thai border won't be completed until 2011. The article concludes by noting that the Yunnan Highway Development Investment Corporation has a heavy debt burden that it must repay, sharply reducing the money available to spend on roads. An unnamed official in Xishuangbana is quoted as saying the Chinese central government should take responsibility for Yunnan's international highways, saying that "The Chinese government should see the construction and maintenance of these roads as part of its responsibility to international society and not give up on them halfway." The article concludes that western observers see China as building a great highway network with itself at its center, but given all the problems the highways have had and the poor support Yunnan's international highways have received, the road construction effort can be only just barely be said to have begun. END SUMMARY TRANSLATION COWHIG