The idea was a Chinese economic colony in the Lao wilderness, and that was okay with Laos. Then the gamblers, hookers and gangsters took over, and that was not okay with China.
The pink buildings were meant to serve as hotels and office space in Boten. Shops and housing in front were razed to make way for a new marketplace.
Across Asia, once-backward regions have surged in the boom that's lifted millions out of poverty--monuments to the Asian economic miracle. But there have been grand schemes that went spectacularly wrong. Few compare with Golden Boten City, a project that promised a beehive of economic activity in northern Laos by the Chinese border, but today sits lonely and desolate.
Route 3 in the Lao highlands cuts through rubber plantations and forests, a vast carpet of greenery interrupted only by tiny villages--groups of shacks on stilts and tribal people in bright blue, red and black garments. Then suddenly there's a clearing--and the surreal sight of a dozen enormous buildings erupting from the plateau in blistering shades of pink, orange and yellow.
This is Golden Boten City, a "Paradise for Freedom and Development," as the investment brochures called it. In 2003 a developer leased the 21-squarekilometer site from Laos for 99 years, and buildings started going up the next year. The plan called for a trade zone in what was expected to be a key growth
corridor, with road and rail links from southern China to ports as far away as Bangkok and Singapore. Drawings depict a golf course, a resort and apartment blocks along picturesque lakes and lagoons. Instead, Boten quickly became a Gold Rush-style boomtown and, like many such towns, renowned for gambling, crime and bustling brothels.
At Boten's peak thousands of people each day poured across the border from China's Yunnan Province, thanks to unprecedented visa-free access. As gaming halls proliferated, rows of shops sprouted--a ramshackle market serving Sin City. A dozen lingerie shops catered to battalions of Chinese prostitutes, with the finest choice of stiletto heels in Laos. Pharmacies stocked sex potions alongside racks of X-rated DVDs and containers of bile from black bears fresh from a hilltop factory and used in traditional Chinese medicine. Next door to the factory was a massive pink entertainment hall that boasted transvestite shows. The ladyboys hailed from Thailand but everything else came from China: the beer, the police and practically all the dealers, even the currency that made it all possible. Hotel signs were in Chinese, and Boten's clocks didn't run at Laos' sleepy pace, but were set an hour ahead to China time. Boten was completely a Chinese colony.
Then, just as fast as gamblers from China turned this remote site into the Macau of the jungle, Golden Boten City melted down. Stories in the Chinese media talked about hostages held over gambling debts. Residents told FORBES ASIA of bodies dumped in the river. China cut off electricity and telecom service to the enclave and started requiring visas. "We heard reports of killings, of people disappearing," an official of Golden Boten City Ltd., the developer, told FORBES ASIA during a visit in May. (The developer said it didn't run the casinos; that was done by several little-known operators from abroad.) "We don't disagree that there have been problems here, but we are working to correct them."
Days later the last casinos shut down. The shops closed for a lack of customers, leaving behind a huge supply of stiletto heels along with a giant picture of American actor George Clooney gazing forlornly from an unopened luxury goods emporium, one of a half-dozen grandiose structures that had been completed but now stand unused. The bears were still packed in cages, milked of bile, but the ladyboys returned to Thailand, and Boten was left a ghost town.
uly 28, 2011 5:21 AMLao forests feeding Vietnam industry, group says
(AP) BANGKOK — Despite an export ban, Vietnamese companies are smuggling logs from the once rich forests of Laos to feed a billion-dollar wood industry that turns timber into furniture for export to the Europe and the United States, an environmental group said Thursday.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency alleged that the Vietnamese military was heavily involved in bribing Lao officials and then trafficking the timber on a massive scale to wood processing factories in neighboring Vietnam. This was denied by the government and military.
Laos, with some of the last intact tropical forests in the region, in 1999 slapped a ban on the export of raw timber and says it is expanding its forest cover. But there are widespread reports of rampant logging, often associated with the country's mushrooming dam projects and agricultural plantations.
"Vietnam is almost annexing areas of Laos to feed its own industries. The only winners in Laos are corrupt government officials and well-connected businessmen," Julian Newman, an EIA staffer, said at a news conference. The group focuses on environmental crime worldwide.
Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga denied the allegations.
"There is no smuggling of timber from Laos by the Vietnamese military," she said. "Vietnam pays special attention to environmental protection, strictly forbids smuggling and illegal exploitation of timber."
She said all "smuggling and illegal exploitation of timber will be strictly dealt with in accordance with Vietnamese law. The governments of Vietnam and Laos have been and will be coordinating to prevent all smuggling activities including timber smuggling."
Hanoi has acknowledged in the past that its forestry industry is unsustainable and it is currently negotiating with the European Community to certify its exported wood products as having originated from legal sources.
Vietnam, which exports some $4 billion worth of wood products, banned domestic logging in 1997.
In an undercover operation in 2010 and 2011, the group said it tracked logs in Laos obtained by three Vietnamese enterprises as they made their way across the porous border to factories in Vietnam. It estimates the enterprises yearly smuggle some 8.8 million cubic feet (250,000 cubic meters) of wood worth some $80 million.
One of the three was identified as the Vietnamese Company of Economic Cooperation, or COECCO, an enterprise run by the Vietnamese army and headquartered in the city of Vinh. The company has been in the logging business in Laos for two decades, EIA said.
But officials for the company in Vietnam said it had a license from the Lao government to import logs, obtaining them in exchange for roads and irrigation projects it has built in the country.
The company announced on its website last month the opening of bids for more than 1.2 million cubic feet (34,000 cubic meters) of logged limber imported from Laos. The officials declined to give their names, citing policy.
The Lao government, as part of its 2020 forestry strategy, says that it will "strictly implement the export ban on logs and sawn timber." The ban is covered in a 1999 law and a number of subsequent government orders.
Commenting on the military company's imports, Newman said it may have engineered a "one-off deal" because of its close ties with powerful Lao officials.
International aid agencies in Laos frequently complain that provincial power brokers often make their own business deals with foreign companies, sometimes in contravention to central government laws and regulations.
Video shot by EIA showed trucks hauling piles of logs from Laos into Vietnam and featured both Lao and Vietnamese businessmen talking about bribing Lao government officials to allow the illegal exports. EIA says its investigators posed as potential buyers.
Laos' export ban is also routinely flouted by companies supplying the wood industries of neighboring Thailand and China, EIA said.
EIA first exposed the illegal cross-border trade in 2008 and said that little has changed on the ground since, although the Vietnamese government is moving toward some kind of control.
"By the time the deals (with EU and others) are signed, there won't be any forests left in Laos. Vietnam needs to get its act together and move quickly," Newman said.
