China’s green facade and its grim, red reality for Cambodia

Communist China wants you to believe it cares about the environment. Look at us, says Beijing: we make EVs and solar panels. We produce cuddly pandas. We’re going green!

Try telling that to the people of Cambodia. They know better. They know how Chinese corporations have devastated Cambodia’s forests, polluted its waters, and forcibly expelled rural populations from their homes—and all to benefit business interests affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.

How has China managed to gain such ascendancy in Cambodia? The answer involves a politician who has dominated Cambodia for the past forty years: a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander named Hun Sen.

Shunned by most nations for its genocidal violence, the Communist Khmer Rouge regime received its principal financial backing in the 1960s and ‘70s from Mao Zedong, who saw in the “Red Khmers” an ideological extension of China’s own Cultural Revolution. Like the Red Guards of Mao’s China, Khmer Rouge cadres were militantly atheist. They murdered Christians and Muslims as adherents of faiths labeled poisonously “foreign”; and they killed Buddhist monks by the thousands, deriding them as parasitic “reactionaries” retarding the Khmer Rouge in its creation of a Communist utopia. In its pursuit of this utopia it also destroyed places of worship, including Catholic cathedrals in the cities of Phnom Penh and Battambang.

The Khmer Rouge fell after Vietnam’s December 1978 invasion of Cambodia; but Hun Sen—who had switched sides in a political purge and fled to Vietnam the year before—eventually emerged as Cambodia’s prime minister. Once established in power, he appointed fellow former Khmer Rouge cadres to key posts in his government—while keeping close ties with the People’s Republic.

Over the years he has aligned his foreign and domestic policies so closely with Beijing’s as to make Cambodia effectively a satrapy of China. True, last year he arranged for his son Hun Manet to succeed him as prime minister, but Sen remains a controlling presence. (Currently he holds the position of “Senate president.”) In any case, this family dynasty has maintained close relations with its powerful patron, as reflected in two events in May of this year.

From May 16 to May 30, the armed forces of both nations conducted joint land/sea maneuvers in exercises labeled “Golden Dragon.” The operation featured the deployment of Chinese warships in the Gulf of Thailand and elements of the People’s Liberation Army Southern Theater Command in Cambodia’s Kampong Chhnang province.

And on May 28 Hun Manet announced that in honor of China’s supreme leader one of Phnom Penh’s main thoroughfares would be renamed Xi Jinping Boulevard. (The city already has an avenue that bears the name of Chairman Mao.)

But China’s influence makes itself felt in more than road signs or even warships off the coast. One example: a Chinese real-estate firm called Tianjin Union Development Group, which in 2008 was authorized by Cambodia’s government to create a gambling resort on coastal forest land that had been a wildlife sanctuary and national park. Local villagers lost their homes and were driven away to make space for a casino, golf courses, deluxe condos, and a port for giant cruise ships.

The same pattern can be seen in the Areng Valley of Koh Kong province, where in 2014 the Phnom Penh government authorized two Chinese firms—Sinohydro Resources and China Guodian Corp—to build a hydropower dam that would have flooded a rainforest sacred to Buddhists and destroyed the livelihood of thousands of local fisherfolk and farmers.

But things turned out differently, thanks to a newly established environmentalist group known as Mother Nature Cambodia (MNC). Under the leadership of founder Alejandro Gonzalez Davidson, MNC drew nationwide attention to this proposed construction.

I learned the details about this during a visit to Phnom Penh last November, when my wife, Jody, and I met in person with several MNC members: a young man named Phay Phanya and two young women, Long Kunthea and Phuong Keo Reaksmey. (“Call me Ah Keo,” she told us, using her nickname.) All three impressed us with their energy, idealism, and sense of purpose—along with a very evident passion for Cambodia’s natural habitat and its people.

They told us what happened once MNC sounded an alert about the proposed dam. Monks from Phnom Penh and beyond converged on the valley, marching through the forest wrapping saffron robes around trees in an act of consecration. “If you kill the tree after it’s consecrated,” Phanya told us, “it’s like killing a monk: bad karma, bad things will happen to you.” Public outcry was so great that the deal collapsed and the Chinese companies withdrew. “But we stay vigilant,” Phanya concluded, “in case they try something again.”

Vigilance has been needed on many fronts. Ah Keo and Kunthea told us they’d been arrested after posting videos protesting the government’s plan to fill in Boeung Tamok, one of the last freshwater lakes in Phnom Penh, to build highrises and luxury housing. As members noted in one video, such lakes are vital as natural urban reservoirs. Filling in Boeung Tamok would only worsen the flooding on the streets of Phnom Penh during the city’s monsoon storms. MNC announced plans via Facebook for a quiet protest walk through the capital.

This was enough to land both Ah Keo and Kunthea in jail. In May 2021, each was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for “incitement to commit a felony or cause social unrest” by publicly questioning the government’s plan to fill Lake Tamok. They were released after fourteen months, with the warning that they’d be imprisoned again at the first sign of further protest.

Which didn’t stop them. When we met in November, these women said they were using their freedom since being released from jail to encourage Cambodia’s “new generation of Khmer youth” to develop a love for the natural world. MNC has initiated programs ranging from a plastic-waste education campaign to study-tour expeditions in which young urban students go to rural areas and learn about life in the nation’s forest communities. And they had good news: Ah Keo told us MNC had just received international recognition in winning an award from Sweden’s Right Livelihood Foundation.

Despite the threat of more imprisonment, our friends have kept up their investigations of corporations that harm Cambodia’s environment. Since our return to the States, we’ve followed their video postings on MNC’s Facebook page.

To cite a few from recent months: A Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturer named Phoenix Industrial has been pouring toxic effluent into Song Kae River, thereby treating Cambodia’s environmental legislation, in the words of one MNC commentator, as “mere toilet paper.” Another Chinese corporation, boasting the name EcoLocal Solution Co Ltd, has been dumping massive amounts of medical waste and factory trash into the Peam Krasaop Wildlife Sanctuary, thereby threatening the forest’s animals and its mangrove ecosystem. And a third Chinese company, a Hunan-based outfit known as Cambodia Game Farm Food Co Ltd, has released so much chemical runoff into local rivers in Sihanoukville’s Kompung Seila district that it’s killed off crops, fish, and cows—while also exposing local farmers to heightened risks of cancer.

After all this, I was alarmed but not too surprised to receive a text from Phanya very recently telling us that Ah Keo and Kunthea are both back in court. Along with eight of their MNC teammates, they’re now charged with “plotting against Cambodia’s government.” The penalty if convicted: up to ten years in prison. It’s all part of what Human Rights Watch calls the government’s “continued vendetta” against MNC.

The first full day of their trial was June 5. In violation of the judiciary’s own regulations, journalists and the public were abruptly barred from the courtroom. To protest this illegal move, the defendants got up and walked outside. As the charges of their “plotting” were read aloud indoors, they sat in quiet meditation. A photo they sent me shows them holding joss sticks behind clusters of lotus flowers carefully arrayed on the pavement by MNC supporters. (In this crisis the lotus seems perfect. In Buddhism—resurgent now after the horrors of the all-too-recent past—it symbolizes purity and serenity rising free above the sufferings of our existence. Those are values with which onlookers could easily empathize.)

Through all this the defendants are showing their determination to stay strong. Kunthea texted me after the first day of the trial: “We arrived home safely but feeling a bit tired because we had to sit in the hot weather for almost 4 hours.” Ah Keo wrote to tell us how her dog is doing. (We all share a love of four-legged furry beings.)

But I can’t help but worry. For our friends. And for their nation.

Meantime if someone tells you Communist China has now gone feel-good green, just ask: Hey, what about its use of Cambodia as a throwaway dumping ground?