![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://uknews.evprotec.com/the-shadowy-chinese-firm-that-owns-chunks-of-cambodia/&media=https://uknews.evprotec.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/131227841_photo18-8-2566be075956.jpg&description=BBC/ Benjamin Begley A highway cuts through Cambodia's Botum Sakor national park towards the coast - and the Dara Sakor project The highway runs through the forest like a black ribbon, down to the sea and to what must be one of the world's largest tourism projects. Fifteen years after it began, there is still not much to see of the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort in southern Cambodia. It is a grandiose scheme by a Chinese company to build a self-contained tourist city. A Chinese colony, some have called it a venue for "feasting and revelry", according to the company, complete with international airport, deep-sea port, power stations, hospitals, casinos and luxury villas. The airport is still unfinished. A single casino, with an attached five-star hotel and apartments, sits alone near the sea, fronted by an unmade road, and surrounded by a construction site. 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. China's economic footprint in Cambodia now dwarfs that of any other country. It provides half of all direct investment and most of its foreign aid. Cambodia is an enthusiastic partner in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), President Xi Jinping's strategy for expanding Chinese built-and-funded-infrastructure around the world. A lot of this is clearly beneficial. But a great deal of Chinese investment is speculative, rushed and poorly planned. The once quiet coastal town of Sihanoukville, for example, across the bay from Dara Sakor, was transformed in just a few years into a huge construction site to feed Chinese demand for casinos. It fuelled a crime wave and then a collapse of the gambling economy during Covid, littering the town with half-built, empty tower blocks. There are good reasons to fear Dara Sakor may suffer similar problems. "It's like baking without flour," says Sophal Ear, a Cambodian academic at Arizona State University. "Y){kind=link}
The highway runs through the forest like a black ribbon, down to the sea and to what must be one of the world’s largest tourism projects.
Fifteen years after it began, there is still not much to see of the Dara Sakor Seashore Resort in southern Cambodia.
It is a grandiose scheme by a Chinese company to build a self-contained tourist city. A Chinese colony, some have called it a venue for “feasting and revelry”, according to the company, complete with international airport, deep-sea port, power stations, hospitals, casinos and luxury villas.
The airport is still unfinished. A single casino, with an attached five-star hotel and apartments, sits alone near the sea, fronted by an unmade road, and surrounded by a construction site.
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.