Last week, eight Chinese-made light attack jets sat on a half-finished runway at Ban Keun, flanked by more than two dozen military support vehicles, offering the first aerial glimpse of a new Chinese-Lao military facility north of the Lao capital, Vientiane.
The speed of the buildup and the earthmoving visible around the airstrip in the satellite imagery suggest China may have acquired its first full-fledged military base in Southeast Asia. If so, over a decade of Chinese infrastructure lending likely left Laos too indebted and too dependent to refuse the outpost.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled in Kazakhstan in 2013, has certainly not delivered the economic windfall it promised for Laos, not least from a US$6 billion high-speed rail line connecting the two neighbors that has likely done more for Chinese migration into Laos than mutually beneficial two-way trade.
Rather, the train and other Belt and Road projects have given Beijing something else: leverage. Across Southeast Asia, China has turned economic ties into political and now military power, most overtly in Myanmar and Cambodia but now also in Laos, an impoverished neighbor of just eight million people that is firmly in Beijing’s economic orbit.
China’s Ministry of National Defense said in a September 30 statement that the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center and a China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy “officially went into operation on September 29, 2026.”
The Chinese statement said Lao Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Khamlieng Outhakaysone attended the inauguration ceremony, along with a delegation from China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The Chinese ministry said the two sides would jointly maintain and operate the center, which it described as “aimed at helping Laos strengthen the training of its air force pilots.” The statement asserted it is “not directed against any third party” and “contributes to enhancing practical military cooperation as well as promoting regional peace and stability.”
It’s not clear, however, that neighboring Thailand or Vietnam will view the facility the same way. Located about 50 kilometers north of the Lao capital, Ban Keun was an airfield used by the Americans during the Vietnam War era, known as “Lima Site 44.”
Air America, a secretive airline controlled by the US Central Intelligence Agency, used Ban Keun to carry US-backed ethnic minority Hmong fighters from highland areas as well as supplies into remote mountain airstrips, Reuters reported.
Analysts say the new Chinese-funded facility there may not stay modest for long. Alexander Neill, an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum in Hawaii, told Reuters the airfield appears engineered to allow a runway extension that “could in future serve larger aircraft, including signals intelligence and electronic-surveillance planes to extend China’s reach into Southeast Asia.”
Diplomats and analysts, meanwhile, will be watching for the introduction of air defenses, fuel and ammunition storage, and surveillance installations, any of which would suggest the base is meant for much more than training.
Laos may have little to no choice but to accommodate China’s commands on the base and potentially others down the line. Chinese state-owned and private companies have financed, built and operate many of Laos’ large hydropower dams, which contribute largely to the small nation’s big power export ambitions.
Upstream, Chinese dams on the Mekong River have altered water flows into Laos and downstream into Thailand and Cambodia. Chinese firms also hold extensive Lao mining concessions, tapping into rich reserves of copper, gold and some rare earth metals. And Chinese capital has turned large stretches of the country into rubber, banana and timber plantations that serve mainly the Chinese market.
The United States and its Western allies have done little to counter China’s spreading influence in Laos beyond working through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), hoping the bloc can counter Beijing’s pull on Vientiane. ASEAN, however, operates on the twin cardinal principles of “non-interference” and “consensus”, meaning it is ill-suited to any geopolitical rebalancing task.
Cambodia is another version of the same Belt and Road Initiative playbook. China is Cambodia’s largest investor and closest political partner, and years of Belt and Road financing for ports, roads, power plants and special economic zones have deepened Phnom Penh’s economic reliance on Beijing. That dependence has had a military payoff, most visibly at the Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand.
Fears over China’s presence at Ream first surfaced in 2019, when The Wall Street Journal reported that US officials had seen a draft agreement giving China 30-year use of the base, including the right to post personnel, store weapons and berth warships. Phnom Penh predictably denied it, noting that its constitution forbids foreign bases.
But China began helping to fund a revamp of the facility in 2022, soon after the demolition of a US-funded building on the site in 2020 amid a downturn in bilateral ties on democracy issues and suspended joint military exercises. Chinese warships have since docked there for months at a time.
Ream’s renovation was completed in 2025 with a new pier able to take much larger ships and a dry dock for repairs. Prime Minister Hun Manet inaugurated the base on April 5 of that year, with a delegation from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on hand, and said Cambodia had “nothing to hide.”
Within days, China and Cambodia held joint exercises at a China-Cambodia Joint Support and Training Center there. That name is strikingly similar to the one given to the new facility at Ban Keun in Laos, suggesting a Beijing-scripted template: a “joint” training and support center that gives China cover for and a permanent military foothold.
Cambodia insists Ream is open to all friendly nations, and in January 2026 the USS Cincinnati became the first US warship to dock at the upgraded base. But strategic analysts remain skeptical. Having paid for the expansion, they argue, China will continue to enjoy preferential access whatever the constitution says, and Phnom Penh’s hedging looks more like a way to blunt Western criticism than real rebalancing.
The pattern is by now familiar: Beijing finances infrastructure in a Southeast Asian country, the host government denies any quid pro quo and a military presence quietly emerges in the name of joint training.
Myanmar is another ASEAN country where China has made considerable inroads. Beijing’s security planners have long seen Myanmar as a link between China and South and Southeast Asia, and as the one country that can provide safe, relatively easy access to the Indian Ocean and beyond.
The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, part of the Belt and Road Initiative, includes an already built deep-sea port at Kyaukphyu on the Bay of Bengal and plans for highways and railways linking Myanmar’s coast to China’s southern Yunnan province, and is a vital link in China’s push south.
For decades, the West condemned Myanmar’s junta for human rights abuses but did little constructive to loosen China’s ever-tightening grip on Myanmar. Instead, it was the generals themselves who took the initiative to mitigate Myanmar’s dependence on Beijing.
According to Myanmar army documents seen by Asia Times, the generals viewed dependence on Beijing as a threat to national sovereignty and concluded that Myanmar needed better relations with the West to maintain sovereignty and independence.
That required certain democratic concessions to the West, including freeing political prisoners, allowing press freedom and making way for political parties like Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy to contest elections. The NLD won in a landslide in 2015, outpacing the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party proxy and catapulting Suu Kyi to power as state counselor.
The West initially cheered this, though Suu Kyi kept an open line to Beijing, especially as Western criticism of her rule mounted over the Rohingya issue. But when the NLD won another landslide in 2020, the generals had had enough and seized power in a February 2021 coup, ending what many had hoped was the start of a new democratic experiment, but which was, in reality, a brief interlude in a long history of direct and indirect military rule.
The West condemned the coup and reimposed sanctions, opening the way for China to become the Myanmar military’s main supporter again, diplomatically and financially. That, in turn, has put the Belt and Road Initiative-driven CMEC back on track, which analysts say is vital to China’s overall strategy for the region, not least by offering an alternative to its shipping vulnerability at the Malacca Strait chokepoint.
Significantly, Myanmar’s military-drafted 2008 constitution forbids the presence of foreign troops from its soil – but China has recently found a way around the ban. A Private Security Service Law that took effect in February 2025 allows foreign security companies to operate in the country.
Because Chinese private security firms have close ties to the state and PLA, their deployments effectively function as a semi-official presence. Under the law, contractors from these security companies are allowed to bear arms. They have arrived mainly to guard the Chinese-built oil and gas pipelines that run over 2,000 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan, along with resource-extraction sites and the Chinese technicians who work there.
While Myanmar may not yet host a facility like Ban Keun, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar can be seen as successes of the Belt and Road Initiative’s broader strategy of paving the way for regional military inroads, while the US and other outside powers appear neither willing nor able to challenge them.
Shawn W. Crispin contributed reporting from Bangkok.
