"The shadowy Chinese firms that own chunks of Cambodia" 25 September 2023

Fifteen years after it began, there is still not much to see of the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort in southern Cambodia... As a tourist business it has barely got started. But it has already had a damaging impact on one of Asia's richest natural environments, and on the thousands of people who live there...

Development, Hun Sen-style

Dara Sakor is the kind of development favoured by Cambodia's former prime minister Hun Sen. It is on a massive scale, yet it was conceived in almost total secrecy. The BBC has found that there was minimal consultation or evaluation of the human and environmental cost.

The Chinese companies involved provide very little information about themselves, and some have dubious track records...The Dara Sakor project dates back to early 2008, when UDG, a private Chinese construction company based in the northern city of Tianjin, secured a 99-year lease...

As the land was inside the Botum Sakor national park, and greatly exceeded the legal limit of 10,000 hectares for any one project, it would have been very controversial - had anyone else known about it. But because there was no information published about the deal at the time, there was no discussion of it in the Cambodian media...

Since 2008 the national park has lost almost 20% of its primary forests...More than 1,000 families have been uprooted and forced to abandon their villages.

In those first years there were many protests. Today Som Thy [ a local fisherman] is one of a small group which still refuses to accept the company's compensation package. He says it is impossible to make a living from the small plots of land they have been given...

According to the Chinese environmental organisation GEI, there is no evidence that the company has conducted any environmental impact assessments, as required by Cambodian law. Nor could GEI find any information about how the forests, which were supposed to be protected, were redesignated as suitable for development. GEI says it presented its concerns to UDG. "They did not respond to these points," programme director Ling Ji told the BBC...

Chasing Chinese influence

In 2020 the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on UDG, citing human rights abuses against those evicted from their villages, but also the potential military use by China of the new airport...

UDG has called the sanctions unjustified. The company says the US is acting on "fabricated facts and rumours", saying it "always religiously followed procedures required by law", and that those living inside its concession were illegal settlers... UDG also took issue with the US description of it as a state-owned entity - we are a privately-owned company, it said.

This may be true, but there has been strong backing from Chinese state agencies from the earliest stages of the project... UDG has also built close relationships with senior figures in the Cambodian ruling party...

And UDG's leading role now appears to have been taken over by another company, China City Construction Company or CCCC... Executives from CCCC now play a leading role in UDG, and CCCC states that it, not UDG, is responsible for "the design of the overall programme for the planning and development of this special tourism zone"...

Burst bubble

CCCC is a state-owned enterprise. But it is also a troubled company...

Another investor in Dara Sakor is a Chinese entrepreneur called She Zhijiang, who has gained notoriety for running casinos along the Thai-Myanmar border, where large-scale human trafficking and scam operations have been uncovered... Publicity over scam centres operating in Chinese investment zones in Cambodia is now deterring Chinese tourists from visiting...

But a different approach under the new Cambodian PM is unlikely, according to Sebastian Strangio. "He will be a prisoner of this system. He will have limited power to rein in its excesses, even if he should wish to do so," he says...

The sheer weight of vested interests in the rapacious model of development followed in Cambodia until now makes it very hard to change...