Hidden Flows: Hydropower and the Rhythms of Development on the Mekong

The Xayaburi Hydroelectric Power Project entered operation in October 2019. After this the Mekong started to behave strangely—the water ran blue and clear instead of red and silty, and the great backflow of the river into Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake arrived off schedule or, at times, threatened to not arrive at all. Villagers who had remained ambivalent or apathetic about hydropower issues suddenly found themselves facing a radically altered world, where a seemingly distant power was able to dramatically alter the nature of their every day. These shifts introduced an arrhythmia into the hydroscape: ecological, fishing, and religious cycles adapted to a seasonal river were off sync with power demands. 

The radical alteration that dams make to the landscape, in the promise of irrigation, electrification, and the sheer feat of changing a river, are a tangible symbol of the state’s power over its land. But with a deep look into hydropower projects—in this case, the dams across the midstream of the Mekong in Laos and China—the story grows more convoluted. Here are conflicting narratives of power: state-focused, international, and royalist; as well as religious, ecological, and hydrosocial. Here, too, as I found in my eight years of fieldwork in Lao-speaking Thailand, is an alteration in time, where the rhythms of the river change the rhythms of life, and where the cyclical riparian clock clashes with a future-oriented developmentalist notion of time.