Thai Land Bridge bid straddles a delicate US-China line

BANGKOK – Thailand hopes China will help build a US$2.8 billion, east-west highway and railway “Land Bridge” across the kingdom, linking the Andaman Sea and Gulf of Thailand as a short-cut for oil and other international cargo currently sailing further south via Singapore and the Malacca Strait.

Inland southern China could then also use existing north-south roads and rails to enable Chinese overland access, for the first time, to southern Thailand’s two planned deep-sea ports on the Andaman and Gulf coasts, opening westward to the Indian Ocean and east to the Pacific.

Thailand describes the Land Bridge plan as a faster, shorter and cheaper route for international shipping compared to the narrow, congested, southern Strait of Malacca wedged between Singapore and Indonesia.

The scheme marks a scaled-down version of the often-proposed but never-realized Kra Canal, more recently dubbed the Thai Canal, which envisions digging a channel across southern Thailand’s narrow Kra isthmus.

The canal scheme, which would could cost upwards of $25 billion by some estimates, has sunk on a constitutional provision that defines the kingdom as “indivisible.” The Land Bridge concept, the project’s advocates say, dodges any potential legal challenge.

The Land Bridge could also become an alternative route if hostilities erupt in the region and the Malacca Strait is blockaded by the US as a way to disrupt China’s trade and energy imports from the Middle East – a strategic chokepoint often referred to as China’s “Malacca dilemma.”

Many of the international ships passing Singapore carry Middle Eastern oil and other products to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific.

The Beijing-headquartered Asian