Along Route 3 in Laos and other areas where the roads pass, people are both fearful of China’s sway and hopeful about progress.

By THOMAS FULLER

LUANG NAMTHA, Laos - The newly refurbished Route 3 that cuts through this remote town is an ordinary strip of pavement, the type of two-lane road you might find winding through the sunflower fields in the French provinces.
But On Leusa, 70, who lives near the road, calls it “deluxe.
As a young woman she traded opium and tiger bones along the road, then nothing more than a horse trail.
The prime ministers of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam officially inaugurated the former opium smuggling route as the final link of what they call the “north-south economic corridor, an 1,850-kilometer network of roads linking the southern Chinese city of Kunming to Bangkok.
The network, several sections of which were still unpaved as late as December, is a major milestone for China and its southern neighbors. The low-lying mountains here, the foothills of the Himalayas, served for centuries as a natural defensive boundary between Southeast Asian civilizations and the giant empire to the north. The road rarely follows a straight line as it meanders through terraced rice fields and tea plantations.
Today, those same Southeast Asian civilizations alternately crave closer integration with that empire and fear its sway as an emerging economic giant. China, in turn, covets the land, markets and natural resources of one of Asia’s least developed and most pristine regions.
With trade across these borders increasing by double digits every year, China has helped construct a series of roads inside the territory of its southern neighbors. The Chinese government is paying half the cost of a bridge over the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand, due for completion in 2011.
It financed parts of Route 3 in Laos and refurbished roads in northern Myanmar, including the storied Burma Road used by the Allies in World War II to supply troops fighting the Japanese. China is also building an oil and gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar to Kunming.
Taken together, these roads are breaking the isolation of the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, areas that in recent decades languished because of wars, ethnic rivalries and heroin trafficking. The roads run through the heart of the Golden Triangle, the region that once produced 70 percent of the world’s opium crop.
The new roads, as well as upgraded ports along the Mekong River, are changing the diets and spending habits of people on both sides of the border. China is selling fruit and green vegetables that favor temperate climates to its southern neighbors, and is buying tropical fruit, rubber, sugar cane, palm oil and seafood.
“You never used to see apples in the traditional markets, said Ruth Banomyong, an expert in logistics who teaches at Thammasat University in Bangkok.
China has blasted shallow sections of the Mekong to make it more easily navigable for cargo barges, allowing traders to ship apples, pears and lettuce downriver. The price of apples in Thailand has fallen to the equivalent of about 20 cents apiece from more than a dollar a decade ago. Roses and other cut flowers from China have displaced flowers flown in from the Netherlands, making Valentine’s Day cheaper for Thais. Traders now have the choice of shipping by barge, truck or both.
Overall, even before the completion of the road, trade between China and the upland Southeast Asian countries Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam had risen impressively, to $53 billion in 2007 from just over $1 billion a decade ago.
People are on the move as well.
Wang Suqin, the director of express services at the Kunming bus terminal, says Chinese tourists are eager to travel overland to Thailand.
“Every day we receive calls about this, Ms. Wang said.
Chen Jinqiang, a Chinese government official from Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province, said the road would help ensure that farmers get their vegetables and flowers to market, avoiding a problem he witnessed in the 1980s, when poor transportation left watermelons rotting in the fields. “Even the pigs refused to eat them, he said.
But the road also excites old fears of the monolith to the north.
Preecha Kamolbutr, the governor of Chiang Rai Province, in northern Thailand, said it might exacerbate what he calls a “Chinese invasion. He is particularly concerned for Laos, he said, an impoverished country the size of Britain but with a population of just 6.5 million.
“Chinese businessmen come in with their own capital, their own workers and their own construction materials, the governor said.
“I fear that in the future the Lao people might feel that they’ve been exploited. They will feel they’ve been invaded.
For now, those fears do not appear to be shared by many Laotians. Residents of the sparsely populated Luang Namtha Province said they welcomed visitors and were counting on an influx of Chinese, Thais and others to help raise their incomes.
Cash-strapped Laos is encouraging Chinese investment by handing out what it has plenty of: land. Deputy Prime Minister Somsavat Lengsavad has said the government will trade “land for capital.
Alinda Phengsawat, the head of tourism planning in the province, said the road would bring visitors to what has been a very remote part of the country. “Maybe they will stay overnight, she said.
Since paving was completed late last year, people who live deep in the jungle have come to the edge of Route 3 to sell vegetables and forest products, residents say.
“You have a huge hinterland that’s pretty badly served at the moment, from Kunming down through Laos and northern Thailand, said John Cooney, director of the Southeast Asia infrastructure division at the Asian Development Bank, which financed one section of the road in Laos. “That suddenly is becoming a market.