Ghost Town? Replica Town? Shanghai’s British Town Remains A Facade

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

Shanghai’s Thames Town could have been a ghost city, but I really couldn’t tell with all the brides everywhere. Yes, the entire village is speckled with people dressed up as brides and grooms, they are frolicking about, posing, getting their pictures taken in the 1:1 scale stage set of England which envelopes them. They come off as a hoard — a real unruly mob that’s running the joint — but that’s just because there is pretty much nobody else here.

If this was a theme park or a Las Vegas-esque tourist gimmick it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or garner an askance glance, but this place is for real: it’s an actual city district. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

Thames Town is a one square kilometer British themed new development in the suburbs of Shanghai that was intended to house 10,000 people in a low-density, single-family housing units. Like most of China’s otherWestern-themed developments it’s a real two for one: a replica town and a ghost town. Though many of the properties sold rapidly to wealthy investors and property speculators, very few people actually moved in. It’s the same old Chinese ghost city scenario English style.

I traveled subway line 9 way beyond the boundaries of Shanghai proper, through cabbage field and rice paddies, until I arrived at a place called Songjiang. I was 30 km outside the city, and it took me well over an hour to arrive here from downtown. But at least I had a seat for the most of a trip: people generally don’t ride the subway this far out of the city for the fun of it. As of now, Songjiang lies firmly outside of what is considered an acceptable commute by most Chinese. Songjiang is pretty much another city.

Songjiang is one of China’s very modern ancient cities. The place has been a city for over 2,500 years — far longer than Shanghai — but you’d never know it now: it has been rebuilt beyond recognition, modernized, and a rather large new city development has been planted in the center of it. Apparently, the icing on this new district’s cake was a highfalutin British copycat village. Enter Thames Town.

Thames Town is pretty much just a place to get your picture taken in

Interview: What You Should Know About China’s Copycat Architecture

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

Western and classical Chinese architecture has become extremely common throughout China over the past couple of decades. There are now literally hundreds of towns that look like France, California, England, Austria, and film sets of the Ming Dynasty. China now has dozens of White Houses and almost as many Eiffel Towers, not to mention all the Château de Maisons-Laffittes, Arc de Triomphes, and miniature replicas of the Sydney Opera House. This type of architectural appropriation has pretty much become a new Chinese style, as it is now a normal part of the urban landscape throughout the country.

If you spend any amount of time traveling through the suburbs of China’s cities it’s impossible to avoid this duplitecture, but what does it all mean? While I’ve visited many of these places over the past couple of years and have written extensively on the topic, I still had many questions. So I consulted with Bianca Bosker, the author of Original Copies, a book which investigates China’s duplitecture movement in depth.

Could you give me an outline of the emergence of the Western architecture movement in China? In its current rendition, when and where did it begin and how?

The View From My Window: Hambantota, Sri Lanka

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

The view from my window is a beach. A big beach with nothing on it but some fisherman huts and boats. I get up in the morning and walk down it.

This is Hambantota, a place that the Sri Lankan government has been trying hard to change by any means necessary, sparing no expense for the past five years.

It started out as the dream of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa: to transform his remote, feral home region into the country’s number two city. A massive deep sea port would be built, an industrial zone delineated, an international airport would be dropped between two wildlife preserves, a massive conference center erected, a cricket stadium thrown up, hundreds of kilometers of new highways laid, and a hotel and leisure area planned. It was to be a completely new city built out in the jungle — an entirely new economy — almost completely financed with Chinese money.

But I look out of my window it is clear that the Hambantota dream is still a work in progress. The massive infrastructure projects have yet to have any real observable local impact in terms of business development, seemingly operating in virtual isolation from their surroundings. All of a sudden there was a deep sea port, an international airport, a massive conference center — life goes on.

Ship coming in to the deep sea port.

The deep sea port is located in a place that the locals now call China Harbor. There is no subverting the fact that what started out as a local president’s vision that was financed with Chinese money has become a Chinese project, more and more owned and operated by China. Sri Lanka couldn’t pay their debtor, they couldn’t properly develop their projects, so China is slowly taking over. Hambantota is to become a major station on China’s Maritime Silk Road.

The local reaction?

“We don’t want to see it like Dubai, with big buildings everywhere and no trees,” said a local man who works at a small hotel. “This is Sri Lanka, we like green. All of this development, I’ve seen it since I was a kid. They make some new buildings but the city, the city is still the same.”

When asked what he thinks of China Harbor he just shrugged, as though it was something remote and irrelevant, far removed from his life and hometown, rather than the fortress right down the beach.

“The old government they start something then the new government they are slow to keep doing it.”

He shrugged and walked away. It had nothing to do with him.

I walked down the beach and was waved over by some young fishermen. They saw me taking photos of their boats, which they painted up in many different colors — one being done up to look like a Jamaican flag with a Bob Marley head.

They were sitting in a circle under a shoddily assembled stick and palapa hut. They had bloodshot eyes. The port had nothing to do with them, either. The only impact that it had was that they can’t fish in some of the places they used to and they now have to dodge the occasional freighter. They looked at me and smiled, invited me to sit down. I asked them questions. They just smiled.

I came upon a thatched hut that two fishermen were sitting in front of. I asked about the port — the impact it has had on their lives and livelihood.

“They make it fail,” he said, pointing out the fact that very few ships actually come into the port.

“Is the fishing worse now?” I asked.

“Yes, very worse.”

“Can you fish by the port?”

“No, they have navy. Very dangerous.”

I walked to town and flagged down a tuk-tuk. I wanted to go into the port. I was chased away by a security guard after I walked in through a construction area earlier, so I made to go in through the front door. I’ve been vising ports all across Southeast and South Asia during these research travels, and it is usually a rather involved process to get the proper accreditation to get inside. Not really complicated, just time consuming. I didn’t bother setting this up for Hambantota — my biggest interest here was the local impact. But the locals seemed to give me favorable odds at getting in.

“Can I visit the port?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Just go in.”

So I tried it. I got off the tuk-tuk at the administrative office, introduced myself, told them what I was doing, and asked if I could have a tour of the port.

The big, mustached man behind the desk shrugged and nodded. “Sure. What is your license plate number?”

“I don’t have a car.”

He looked puzzled, and said if I had a car that he could give me an entrance permit without any difficulties. I kept pushing the matter, asking for other options. He told me that I could sit outside the office and ask to tag along in the car of another visitor. However, he had no idea when another would show up.

I grabbed a chair and set it up in the shade outside, faced the parking lot, and waited. I fell asleep. When I woke up I noticed one of the office workers and the guards were flagging down cars as they passed by on the road. Were they helping me? One of the guys glanced back at me somewhat purposefully. They were.

Eventually, they found a guy with a car who had nothing better to do. I ran over and jumped in, accompanied by a port administrator.

We drove into the port through the phase II section, which was currently under construction. There was hardly even a road. I asked my questions, received answers, and got the photos I wanted for articles, the book, etc.

Life goes on in Hambantota as though the international port and the airport and all of the other big development projects didn’t exist. The rural status-quo churns onward in spite of the landscape is physically changing. This is an attitude that I’ve seen along many stops of the New Silk Road. These massive infrastructure projects are often happening without much local engagement, as though somehow encapsulated, removed from the local ecosystem.

But this is only the first act of a very, very long show. The infrastructure framework is what is being put together now, and this is something that rarely produces immediate returns. However, after these pieces are in place, slowly, slowly city grows up around them. Slowly, everything changes — often to the extent that we will forget that the little village, the stoned fishermen and their Bob Marley boats, and the empty stretches of beach were ever there. We will then just take it for granted that the city has always been.

Sunset over the port

The events described here occurred in March 2016.

Writing To Remember

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

The SCMP was the first big publication that I ever regularly wrote for, and my editor there provided me with my first lesson in big journalism. I wrote a story about how expats in China were transitioning from running export based businesses to service sector businesses and how this mirrored China’s broader economic transition. I framed this story as a narrative — I included myself.

“Uh, can you make it more like a news story,” my editor requested.

No problem, I removed the “me.”

The same thing happened on my next article, and I got the point. It was an important lesson to learn.

As the years have rolled on I’ve found myself taking on more and more positions in big media, and the subsequent work load meant that more personal, narrative stories have been getting delayed — often to the point of never being written or published.

I’m realizing now that I’ve missed a large part of the story.

I’ve built up such a large body of stories on Vagabond Journey that adding a few more — or a few hundred more — doesn’t really alter the balance of how much money I make. Earnings waver with the winds of advertising, not anything I do. If I don’t write here it makes me X amount of money. If I do write here it makes me X amount of money. There’s really no substancial difference.

It seems to be a common assumption that the writer works for the reader, and should strive to give them what they want. To a large extent that’s true. But there are other reasons to write. It’s not all commodity.

This is my collection. It’s just a story… so that I can remember.

Writing preserves time. It’s like taking a sequence of observations, conversations, thoughts, experiences, and emotions and enclosing them inside of a plexiglass box. Every once in a while you can stumble back through your own museum and look at the little exhibits you’ve stored there. This is why I do this.

I want to have a storage facility for conversations, impressions, and experiences. Sometimes they are eventually extracted for sections of articles; most of the time it’s just something for my seven year old daughter and I to look through and talk about

If someone can follow this and like it, maybe read it each morning on the way to work, that’s excellent; but that’s not really why I’m still doing this.

On Vagabond Journey, I’m just writing to remember.

Business Is The World’s Language

Economics is a system of communication. It is no mistake that the first words you learn in a foreign language when traveling are those which enable you to buy things.

“How much does it cost?”

“Too expensive.”

“I want.”

Travel is a continuous exercise in buying shit.

Trade is something that people everywhere can easily understand; it’s something that as a species we just get. One of my favorite types of stories are those of ancient mariners showing up on the shores of some remote locale for the first time and meetings with the people there. Almost invariably, if the two sides don’t immediately start killing each other, the rapidly engage in trade. Completely removed cultures all understood the same market fundamentals — which we really haven’t evolved very much away from today.

My first profession was in archaeology. I was young then and I gave it up as an academic pursuit when I realized that it was in large part the study of ancient economics.  I wanted to believe that I would find these non-materialistic ancient cultures who understood the true essence of life that could be reinstated as a model for our time. (Like I said, I was young.) What I found instead were obsessive, and often violent, capitalists and empire builders.

You research migration via trade goods, you can watch how cultures changed over time by their commodities, the earliest forms of writing were accounting records. Trade shows cultural alliances, it showed who is up and who is down, who is driving innovation, and who is copying and trying to keep up. Every big social movement in history is shown in economics.

The central market is the most ethnically diverse place in any city.

Economics is the story of everything.

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

One Way That China Populates Its Ghost Cities

Over the past twenty years China has constructed hundreds of new cities and districts, revamped thousands of towns, and thrown up an almost uncountable number of new neighborhoods. Many of the larger-scale of these new developments tend to stand virtually empty for a significant amount of time after their downtown cores are built — the infamous ghost city phase — as a population and commercial base is gradually grown as a new area comes to life.

The first and probably most profound challenge for populating China’s so-called ghost cities could be called the Catch-22 of new city building: few people are going to move into a city without adequate transportation links, stores, schools, healthcare, and places to work, and these entities are slow to move into a place without people. So how does China get people to move into its new outposts of progress? The same way the country does almost everything else: by fiat.

The way China builds an initial population in its new cities is simple: it makes people move into them. So when a municipality decides to flip on the switch of one of its large new cities or districts — like Shanghai’s Pudong, Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong, or Guangzhou’s Zhujiang — the wheels start moving: government headquarters, the offices of banks and state-owned enterprises, and university campuses are shipped in, subsidies and tax breaks are given to private companies to relocate, and everyone who is associated with these entities are compelled to follow along.

Universities, especially, are a major tool to break the inertia of stagnant new urban developments in China. Often built into the master plans of many of the country’s large new areas are massive university towns, where more than a dozen new campuses can be built side by side that will bring in, literally, hundreds of thousands of students and staff. The idea is that seeding a developing area with a fledgling population base can initiate the beginnings of a local business ecosystem, which will then make the place more attractive to prospective home buyers and residents, which will then attract even more businesses.

China’s students are essentially turned into troops of urbanization as they are sent off to the front lines of their country’s urban frontiers. The effect is that for a good span of the ghost city phase China’s under-inhabited new cityscapes are transformed into epicenters of youth.

Nanhui New City, which sits on the coast of Pudong right outside the Yangshan Free Trade Zone, 60 kilometers from the core of Shanghai, is slated to become a “mini-Hong Kong.” But before it can become such an epicenter of commerce it first has to have some people. Although plots of construction land here often sell for record prices and nearly all the residential properties are quickly bought up as though tossed into a feeding frenzy, for many years actual residents were hesitant to move in. Helping to rectify this situation were eight new university campuses lined up in a row along the western edge of the city, creating a educational compound of more than 100,000 students. The effects of this migration were clear during the early phases of vitalization (prior to 2014) here: when you walked down the streets there was pretty much nobody but students. Rows of them were riding bicycles around the central lake, young couples were stiffly walking side by side through parks, gangs of boys in color-coordinated track suits were jocularly pushing each other around. Without these young people Nanhui New City would have been dead.

Many other cities across China have stimulated their new districts in a similar way.

Longzihu College Park sits in the heart of Zhengdong New District in Zhengzhou, the capital of Hunan province, which was at one time known as China’s largest ghost city. Construction on the university town began in 2003, when most of the broader 150 square kilometer new district was little more than barren development land. It is now a sprawling 11.21 square kilometer educational zone that’s home to 15 university campuses and 240,000 students and staff.

In the 1990s Dachang township was hardly anything more than a village sitting two hours by bus from the center of Shanghai. When the area began to redevelop the first thing the city did was build a new flagship campus for Shanghai University. For some years it sat as a sterile new development — an ivy outpost sprouting up from farm country — but eventually the streets around the university began filling up with restaurants, bars, karaoke parlors, department stores, and international fast-food and cafe chains. Shanghai metro line 7 was extended out to it, significantly reducing the commute from the city center, and people began moving into the new middle class housing complexes which were by then encircling the university.

In Shanghai’s Songjiang district there is a 533-hectare university city which holds the title of China’s largest tertiary education hub. It houses new campuses for at least eight large universities, which have brought thousands of new consumers into a rapidly urbanizing area.

While Suzhou has its Dushu Lake Higher Education Town, a 25 square kilometer, university-speckled expanse with over 100,000 students that’s located in the ever emerging Suzhou Industrial Park.

Chenggong New District in Kunming, Longgang in Shenzhen, and many other cities across China have built large university towns which help vitalize their developing urban areas.

Generally speaking, the decision to construct these university towns isn’t something where a struggling new city or district is like, “Hey, we really need to attract some more people and business, let’s build a university town.” Rather, university towns and new cities tend to have a symbiotic relationship in China, and these educational zones are hardwired into the broader master plans of developing new areas. China’s university system is expanding incredibly fast, absorbing millions of new students, and there is a very real need for new campuses to accommodate these surging masses. At the same time, new university campuses need large amounts of space, which is usually not readily available in the crowded cores of established cities. So new campuses are often shipped out to new developments in the outskirts, where there is plenty of space for them to be built.

As I walked through the downtown part of Nanhui New City, I started up a conversation with a student who had moved there all the way from Gansu province in the far west of China. Her name was Ju Jing, and I could only imagine the shock she must have felt after traveling across the country to go to a university that was technically in Shanghai, the world’s most populated city, only to end up exiled in a partially-built new city that hardly had any people.

“Do you think there will be more people here in the future?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She replied, as though the matter wasn’t debatable.

“How do you know?”

“Because the government will make people come here.”

“How?”

“With universities and companies.”

Something she knew first hand.

By Wade Shepard @vagabondjourney

Chinese Man Tells Me He Doesn’t Like Americans

“I don’t like Americans,” spoke a guy sitting next to me on the bus from Taizhou to Suzhou.

He was a bruiser — had the flattop haircut and everything. He’d previously asked me where I was from, and when I answered that I was an American he begged to differ. He told me that he though I was from China — meaning a Chinese minority, namely a  Uyghur. When asserted a second time that I was, in fact, really from the United States of America he busted out with the xenophobic slur, and then buried his face into his newspaper to ward off any rebuttal.

I could have just let it go — he was finished making his point — but didn’t. “Why don’t you like Americans?” I asked loudly so that other people on the bus could hear.

Caught between rubble and a hard place

Many of Phnom Penh’s 100,000 domestic construction workers live on-site, like Soth Tha’s family. Hong Menea

Soth Tha and his wife, Dus San, wake up every day before dawn in a tent fashioned out of green tarpaulin and a few metal poles. The construction workers are never late to work. Like many, they live on-site.

Tha and San are two of dozens of Cambodian workers building a 25-storey luxury condominium just a stone’s throw from Tuol Tompoung market. They moved to the capital 10 months ago, leaving behind two young sons in Prey Veng province to stay in school.

The parents see their two older sons, who work at a bakery in Tuol Kork, but San is constantly worried about the the ones back home, who come to visit when they can, like this week.

“Whenever we call them, we cry because they are young and have to cook for themselves,” she said. The decision to split up the family wasn’t an easy one, but one born out of desperation.

Like many working in construction, San has to pay off a debt accrued back home in the countryside. It’s a debt that isn’t even hers. “We were cheated by my wife’s brother, who asked us to borrow money for him from the bank. He ran away,” Tha explains.

San’s brother ran a bakery in Phnom Penh, and asked her to co-sign a $5,000 loan two years ago. Three months later, he sold the bakery and disappeared. “We are not happy to live and work here, but we have no choice,” Tha says. “We have to pay the bank.”

In his makeshift home, the only thing that separates Tha from the gravel that litters the floor are a few planks of wood that he and his wife use as a bed.

Dus San came to the capital seeking construction work in order to repay a mounting debt owed to the bank. Hong Menea

Only seven slated for Water Festival pardons

Pardoned prisoners prepare to be released from Phnom Penh’s Prey Sar prison early last year. Vireak Mai

Just seven people have been recommended for pardons by a government committee that yesterday finished assessing some 560 applications for early release ahead of November’s Water Festival, a dramatic reduction from the 106 to receive clemency last year.

But with many high-profile inmates currently being held in the Kingdom’s prisons, officials yesterday declined to offer details on who made the list.

Pardons and reduced sentencing committee spokesperson Kim Santepheap yesterday refused to say whether inmate Seng Chenda, convicted of the attempted murder of Transport Minister Sun Chanthol’s wife and daughter in 2011, was among the seven after having been recommended for a pardon by National Assembly President Heng Samrin.

When asked about opposition party prisoners, he stressed that those selected for potential release were not assessed on their political tendencies. “I want to inform that in each verdict, there is no information related to the political tendency of the inmates as the law must be implemented for everyone who violates the law,” Santepheap said in a message late yesterday. “Among all the inmates, I don’t know whose party they belong to.”

The committee revealed it would also recommend 88 people receive a reduced sentence. Of those, 17 people will be eligible for a year’s reduction on their sentence. Eighteen people could see their jail time reduced by nine months, and 46 could see a six-month reprieve.

Am Sam Ath, technical adviser for Licadho, noted that the relatively small number of pardon cases meant that “irregularities” in the pardons process may also be on the decline.

Fri, 28 October 2016 Bun Sengkong l the Phnom Penh Post

Minister asks to close Sisowath Quay ‘for tourists’

Vehicles drive along Phnom Penh's Sisowath Quay in 2013. Hong Menea

Tourism Minister Thong Khon yesterday requested that Phnom Penh City Governor Pa Socheatvong consider closing Sisowath Quay – the road that runs along the capital’s riverside – from Wat Phnom to the Royal Palace on Saturday and Sunday evenings to better accommodate tourists.

Khon suggested closing that stretch of the road from 5pm to 2am, but stressed it was just a request, and it would be up to Socheatvong “to do it or not”.

“We cannot force them,” he said.

It would also be up to Phnom Penh City Hall to formulate a plan on how to deal with traffic congestion as a result of the closure, he said.

City Hall spokesman Mean Chanyada said Khon had not made a formal request, but city officials believed the idea would be good for tourists.

Once they receive the official request, city officials will meet with ministry officials to discuss what benefits they would see and whether public parking would be needed.

“We need to do it step-by-step,” he said. “When we receive the request . . . we will discuss about it.”

Fri, 28 October 2016

Kong Meta l the Phnom Penh Post

Cambodia in brief: October 28, 2016

White Building plans laid out by ministry
Minister of Land Management Chea Sophara told representatives of residents of Phnom Penh’s White Building yesterday that the iconic structure is to be torn down and replaced with a 21-storey multipurpose tower.

Caught between rubble and a hard place
Soth Tha and his wife, Dus San, wake up every day before dawn in a tent fashioned out of green tarpaulin and a few metal poles. The construction workers are never late to work. Like many, they live on-site.

New app testing cultural norms
A decade ago, Prime Minister Hun Sen banned 3G cellphones after his wife, Bun Rany, issued a public letter warning of the “gravely negative consequences for social morality” and “sexual exploitation of women” that the video-capable phones could allow.

Detentions extended for officials in ‘bribery’ case
The four officials from local rights group Adhoc and the National Election Committee (NEC) official jailed six months ago for “bribing” the alleged mistress of deputy opposition leader Kem Sokha will remain in jail for up to six more months without trial, a judge ruled yesterday.

Waiting to tap rubber’s rebound
The large-scale rubber plantations that arrived in force in Cambodia a decade ago as global rubber prices moved to historic peaks are facing sober prospects as trees they planted before the commodity’s prices headed south begin to reach maturity.

Paratroopers blown into rush-hour traffic in Phnom Penh
Eight paratroopers from the elite 911 airborne brigade will this afternoon theatrically descend into the middle of Olympic Stadium, forming the centrepiece of the opening ceremony for the country’s first ever National Games. They will be hoping not to repeat a disastrous Wednesday practice run.

Ticon follows factory shift to Cambodia
Ticon Industrial Connection Plc, a Thai-based factory and warehouse developer, is expanding its operations into fast-growing Southeast Asian economies, including Cambodia, to help offset sluggish growth at home.

Only seven slated for Water Festival pardons
Just seven people have been recommended for pardons by a government committee that yesterday finished assessing some 560 applications for early release ahead of November’s Water Festival, a dramatic reduction from the
106 to receive clemency last year.

Input on ACU draft legislation weighed
Civil society organisations met yesterday to hash out recommendations for whistleblower and witness-protection laws that the Anti-Corruption Unit aims to pass by year’s end.

US diplomat expresses concern, hopes over upcoming elections
United States Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel yesterday said Cambodia’s political stalemate was a matter of concern, but nonetheless expressed hope the coming elections would be free and fair.

CNRP says letter condemning Sokha's daughter is a fake
The Cambodia National Rescue Party yesterday denied the authenticity of a letter published by a local media outlet purporting to show the party’s youth wing calling for the ouster of deputy leader Kem Sokha’s eldest daughter for criticising party leader Sam Rainsy.

Spurned Sihanoukville officer discharges gun: report
Sihanoukville police said yesterday they are investigating a man who drunkenly fired his weapon into the air, with local media identifying the suspect as a deputy provincial police chief who was angered by a Russian woman turning down his advances.

Minister asks to close Sisowath Quay ‘for tourists’
Tourism Minister Thong Khon yesterday requested that Phnom Penh City Governor Pa Socheatvong consider closing Sisowath Quay – the road that runs along the capital’s riverside – from Wat Phnom to the Royal Palace on Saturday and Sunday evenings to better accommodate tourists.

Latest garment truck crash injures scores
Seventy-two garment workers were injured yesterday when the overloaded truck in which they were travelling overturned while passing a tuk-tuk near their factory in Chroy Changvar district.

Ex-cadre ‘didn’t know’ of goings-on at centre
Attempts by the prosecution to glean information about Mondulkiri’s Phnom Kraol security centre were frustrated by an uncooperative witness who frequently claimed ignorance, often contradicting his prior statements, as well as the previous testimony of his brother.

Free two years, ex-con hacks own dad to death
An ex-convict was arrested after hacking his father to death with an axe in Battambang’s Robos Mongkol commune on Wednesday.

Schools to offer career guidance
As part of ongoing education reforms, a new curriculum set to be implemented in 2018 will address the lack of career counselling in high schools across Cambodia, a Ministry of Education official told attendees of an education forum yesterday.

Doing business ranking falls: World Bank
Cambodia had another poor showing in the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report. The Kingdom ranks 131 out of 190 countries this year, dropping four places in the index in what economists said was an indication that the country was struggling to keep up with the pace of reforms in more advanced economies.

Indigenous rights ‘denied’

Ethnic Kuoy villagers gather at their camp in Preah Vihear last year for a meeting to discuss the protection of their community forests from companies trying to develop the area.Heng Chivoan

Despite Cambodia’s indigenous peoples being legally recognised and protected under the country’s Forestry and Land Laws, limited implementation combined with a lack of coordination have resulted in many indigenous communities being denied their land and legal rights, according to a report released this month by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Airwaves breathe new life into endangered ethnic languages

Fri, 2 March 2012

Sean Gleeson l the Phnom Penh Post

Cambodia’s minority languages receive little recognition, both in this country and abroad. Though the French colonial administration drew a distinction between the ethnic Khmer majority and the highland-dwelling “Montagnards” in the north-eastern provinces, there has been little appreciation, either by colonial administrators or post-independence governments, of the remarkable linguistic and cultural diversity among the residents of these areas.

These languages are now being rescued from obscurity and the threat of extinction, under a radio initiative designed – with the help of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – to safeguard parts of the Kingdom’s cultural heritage.

In 2001, UNESCO compiled the second edition of its Atlas of Endangered Languages. The findings were striking: of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, more than half were projected to disappear by the end of this century. The numbers in Cambodia were even starker: 19 of the country’s 24 catalogued languages have been classified as endangered.

Empowering indigenous people

Thu, 9 August 2012

James Sheehan l the Phnom Penh Post

Ethnic Tampoun villagers perform a traditional dance in Ratanakkiri province last year. Photograph: Adam Miller/Phnom Penh Post

Armed only with courage and solidarity with their fellow Phnong indigenous communities, villagers in Bousra commune in Mondulkiri marched to the private company that was granted an economic land concession for a rubber plantation on their traditional land.

Facing company officials, their collective voices made clear demands of the company: “We came here to take back our land. You use poverty to do your business, but you are taking the land that is rightfully ours.”

The calls for change of this Phnong community are representative of a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples now more aware of their rights to preserve their culture, land, language and religion.

This phenomenon is built on a long struggle for the recognition of the human rights of indigenous peoples, which resulted in the adoption five years ago of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The Declaration, for which 143 member states voted in favour in 2007 (including Cambodia), represents the culmination of decades of advocacy for indigenous peoples’ rights and lays out explicitly rights to land, culture, livelihood and consultation, among other things.

With this global recognition of their rights in hand, indigenous communities have made remarkable achievements in identifying as a community, organising, educating, and – in claiming their rights – successfully putting their interests on the agenda.

Today, International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, we celebrate these achievements.

As examples like the activism of the indigenous in Bousra, the community patrolling in Prey Long forest and the success of the Suoy people in securing protection of 3,000 hectares of forest in Kampong Speu show, Cambodia is no exception to this trend.

With more than 100,000 indigenous people spread across 15 provinces in 24 different groups, the Kingdom possesses a rich indigenous diversity. In common with indigenous peoples around the world, the communities’ relationship with their traditional lands underpins their identity as indigenous.

The Long Road to School in Cambodia

Bouvanna Nhem crosses a river during her 8-mile hike to school. Arriving late and out of breath, it's hard to concentrate in class. Making the long trek each day wears her out. For Bouvanna, the daughter of a poor farming family in Cambodia's remote Ratanakiri province, school seems to be slipping further out of reach. She eventually drops out because of the distance and cost of secondary education. Three years later, when the dismissal bell rings at Andong Meas Lower Secondary School, the 17-year-old ninth grader walks next door to the school's boarding house. Bouvanna considers herself fortunate to have received a scholarship and have a bed nearby. Many of her friends who stayed home in Talav village are already married with children. Other children work in the fields as day laborers.

Bouvanna is indeed fortunate. And, she's one of a growing number of indigenous children and adolescents who are now getting the opportunity to stay in or return to school. Just a few years ago, the situation seemed insurmountable.

Communities in Ratanakiri province face deep poverty, chronic food shortages and geographic isolation. Cultural differences also play a role in the region's isolation: about 115,000 indigenous people from 10 different ethnic groups live scattered across five provinces. Many have no command of Khmer, Cambodia's national language, and are therefore excluded from the mainstream economy, are subject to exploitation and violation of human rights, and lack access to many government services, including schools.

In addition to the fact that the majority of government schools are not accessible to minority groups, the instruction language in the schools is Khmer. The majority of teachers cannot speak the local languages. Consequently, school enrollment and retention rates of the indigenous population – from villages like Talav where Bouvanna is from – are among the lowest in Cambodia and their illiteracy rates are the highest. In fact, a 2002 study found that only 5 percent of men and less than 1 percent of women in Ratanakiri were literate.

"Only about half of the indigenous children in Ratanakiri attend school," says Jan Noorlander, CARE program coordinator in Cambodia. "This area is so remote, it was all but abandoned by the State education authorities, and even where schools did exist, parents, community members and even children themselves were indifferent, at best, to the importance of education. They lost faith in the system and simply stopped sending their children to school."

CARE's Highland Community Education Program (HCEP) is working to change that by helping to meet the educational needs of indigenous populations in northeastern Cambodia. Since 2002, the program has become a unique example of cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) and helped to bring multi-lingual and multicultural primary education to community-governed schools in villages that have never had access to formal or non-formal education before.

Adapting the curriculum to the students

Throughout Ratanakiri, some 800 students are enrolled in CARE-supported schools, where children are instructed in both their local languages and Khmer. HCEP has its own resource production unit that has written and produced more than 80 bilingual textbooks – approved by the MoEYS – that not only prepare primary school students for secondary education and better livelihood options, but also serve to protect and promote local culture. Moreover, as escalating food prices are making food security and nutrition real concerns, many schools have established vegetable gardens that help feed the students and serve as a source of income.

"Through the school gardens, we teach children about nutrition and agriculture," says Noorlander. "These are lessons that they can take back to their home villages and have a real impact on their own communities." In addition to gardens, schools have also constructed latrines and educated children about hygiene and water safety.


By building the ability of communities to establish and manage their own schools, as well as select teachers from their own villages, HCEP is enabling communities to take ownership of their children's education, using their own languages, for the first time. So far, community commitment and ownership have resulted in high enrollment and low drop-out rates. Based on that success, the MoEYS accorded HCEP community schools full registration.

Work with communities is supported by extensive teacher training and curriculum and material development in different ethnic minority languages. The goal is that this community-based bilingual education program will enable ethnic minority children to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between their communities and mainstream education.Work with communities is supported by extensive teacher training and curriculum and material development in different ethnic minority languages. The goal is that this community-based bilingual education program will enable ethnic minority children to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between their communities and mainstream education.

While supporting children to graduate from primary school has been a tremendous achievement, opportunities to advance to secondary education were still greatly limited. To continue their studies through the ninth grade, students must move on to government-run district schools, which can be up to 50 miles from their homes. CARE expanded HCEP's mandate in 2008 to provide continued support for these students.

In addition to working with secondary schools and teachers to improve the quality of teaching and learning and infrastructure, CARE provides scholarships that allow highly motivated students from the poorest families to attend secondary school. These scholarships provide for students' basic needs to live at a boarding house, including food, uniforms, learning materials and transportation home once a month. For students living less than five miles from the school, CARE provides a bicycle, uniforms and learning materials so they can remain at home while attending school. CARE currently supports approximately 350 ethnic minority students who study at secondary schools. Some students have even advanced to high school and will soon graduate from the provincial teacher training college.

Bouvanna, currently a secondary schooler with hopes of attending college one day, participates in the school's girls' leadership program and volunteers as a peer counselor. Self-confident, she's no longer the quiet girl who once had to cross torrents to get to school.

"I enjoy peer counseling because it helps me become an effective listener when my friends tell me problems," says Bouvanna. "Many of the students deal with difficult issues, including family pressure to marry or to contribute to the family income. In class they may feel ashamed to ask questions. I listen to them and we solve the problems together. If not, I know how to send these problems to the appropriate people like the school director or the police."

Story by Allen Clinton, CARE l June 2013