ROAMING the streets of Kunming, the capital city of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, one can’t help but notice the enticing aroma of lemongrass, galangal, and coconut milk wafting from Thai food stalls, along with the variety of Vietnamese coffee beans on display.
Data from Meituan and Dianping, popular city-guide and review platforms akin to Yelp in China, showed that more than 160 new restaurants serving Southeast Asian cuisines have opened in Kunming this year alone, with the majority featuring food from Mekong countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
One such culinary ambassador is Nannaphat Ananmethaphat from Thailand, who started her first restaurant in Kunming in 2005 and now operates eight Thai restaurants in the city. “When I started, local residents were unfamiliar with Thai flavors,” she said. In those early years, Ananmethaphat carefully adapted her recipes, blending local Yunnan ingredients with traditional Thai spices.
The fusion of flavours, increasingly embraced by residents, is a byproduct of the ever-closer people-to-people exchanges. It is also a microcosm of the deepening cultural ties and economic connections between China and the Mekong countries.
The deepening ties culminated at the eighth Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Summit, which concluded in Kunming on Thursday. Chinese Premier Li Qiang attended the summit, calling on the six GMS members to upgrade their cooperation following a productive partnership spanning three decades since the mechanism’s establishment.
The six GMS members — China and the five Mekong countries — launched the GMS Economic Cooperation Programme in 1992 to pool efforts to improve regional infrastructure and enhance trade, investment and economic growth.
Over the past three decades, the GMS has increasingly become an important platform for China and the Mekong countries to discuss cooperation and promote common development. Their cooperations have yielded fruitful results, covering various fields such as infrastructure construction, economic and trade cooperation, cultural exchanges, and innovation. In trade alone, China’s trade with the Mekong countries surpassed US$200 billion in the first half of this year, a 12 per cent increase from the same period last year.
ACCELERATED CONNECTIVITY
The China-Laos Railway, which connects the Lao capital, Vientiane, with Kunming, has transported more than 41.7 million passengers and 46.7 million tonnes of cargo, including 10.7 million tonnes of cross-border goods, since its launch in late 2021.
This vital link has transformed Laos from a landlocked country into a connectivity hub. It has expanded the international logistics network, significantly reducing transportation costs and time and injecting vitality into the regional economy.
SOURCE: XINHUA #TheGlobalNewLightOfMyanmar