R.O.C

Laos is landlocked, meaning it doesn’t have any access to the sea. It’s surrounded on all sides by Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and of course China to the north. That geographical difficulty, and the fact that Laos is littered with 80 million unexploded bombs dropped by the US from 1964 to 1973, has stymied the country’s ability to develop, leaving it one of the poorest countries in the region. The tide has started to turn in Laos’ favor, though, after China helped build the county’s first railway, connecting its capital city, Vientiane, with Kunming in southern China’s Yunnan province. That’s where I got on-board, eager to visit Laos for the first time and find out how this railway has changed the lives of locals, and started transforming Laos from landlocked, to land-linked. All up, we'll take a journey of 1,000 kilometers through gorgeous, wild terrain and bomb-littered wasteland, meeting and chatting with interesting people along the way, including a developer, a local student who learned how to build railways in China, a man who has spent 20 years dealing with the aftermath of the 270 million bombs dropped all across Laos by the USA, a local journalist, and a railway official.

Washington is in a panic after tech giant #huawei released a phone that appears to show China has got around the US’ aggressive attempts to stymie Chinese technological progress with the new Mate 60 Pro. The Washington Post, usually a pretty good barometer of the sentiment on Capitol Hill, opined: “New phone sparks worry China has found a way around U.S. tech limits,” which one analyst described as a slap in the face to Washington. Much deserved, I say! Today I will break the situation down in layman’s terms, and we’ll also catch up with US geopolitical analyst Thomas Pauken the Second. This is Reports on China; I’m Andy Boreham in Shanghai. Let’s get reporting!