A 2,000-meter runway in Ban Keun, situated about 50 kilometers north of the Lao capital of Vientiane, is an unlikely location for US-China great-power rivalry. Yet it may become one of the most revealing markers of China’s strategic ambitions in Southeast Asia.
On September 29, China and Laos opened the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy. Beijing says the facility is designed mainly to train Lao pilots and deepen military cooperation, and that it is not aimed at any third country.
Satellite imagery shows, however, that construction began in late 2025 and has since transformed agricultural land into a sizable aviation complex, complete with a runway, taxiway, apron and supporting buildings.
Ban Keun is not yet an American-style overseas air base, and there is no public evidence that China has stationed a large combat force there.
However, how many Chinese personnel, aircraft and weapons will eventually operate from the site remains unclear. What matters is what the facility could enable over time: persistent Chinese access.
China has spent years extending its economic and political reach across mainland Southeast Asia. Now, military access is emerging on top of that infrastructure. Ban Keun thus looks like an early node in a wider air-access network stretching from southwestern China into the strategic heart of Southeast Asia.
Power projection
China does not need to replicate the American system of permanent overseas bases to project power abroad. The US built much of its military presence through formal alliances, defense treaties and large permanent installations.
Beijing has fewer treaty allies and faces stiffer political resistance to openly hosting Chinese forces. Its emerging model is therefore more incremental, characterized by joint facilities, military exercises, training centers, logistics arrangements and rotational access.
Ban Keun epitomizes this model. It gives China what a base in its southern province of Yunnan cannot: a physical presence inside mainland Southeast Asia.
Modern airpower depends not only on aircraft and missiles but on runways, maintenance, fuel, personnel, training areas and logistics. The facility need not host a large Chinese force to be strategically valuable.
It can familiarize Chinese forces with local operating conditions, build interoperability with a neighboring partner force and establish procedures that could later support more intensive activity.
China’s overseas footprint is already developing along complementary lines. China’s base in Djibouti provides a foothold in the western Indian Ocean along key trade routes.
The China-backed Ream naval facility in Cambodia, which includes a pier, dry dock and other naval-support infrastructure, has improved Beijing’s maritime access in Southeast Asia and given it a potentially valuable southern flank vis-a-vis the US in the South China Sea.
The Ban Keun facility adds an aviation component to the network. Maritime access in Cambodia and air access in Laos serve different purposes but the same aim: reducing the geographical constraints on Chinese military operations beyond its borders.
None of this means China is preparing for war. But Beijing is accumulating strategic options as its competition with the US for regional influence intensifies.
Neighborly links
The military development has piggybacked on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The China-Laos Railway, backed by the infrastructure-building scheme and opened in December 2021, has grown from a bilateral project into a regional logistics corridor.
By August 2026, Chinese state media claimed it had carried more than 21 million metric tons of cross-border cargo on more than 23,000 freight trains. Cargo shipped by rail from China to Laos now reaches at least 19 countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore, state media said. In the first half of 2026 alone, trade carried on the line was worth 17.17 billion yuan, up 33.8% from a year earlier.
The railway is not a military project, and insinuating as much would be hard to substantiate. But as roads, railways, energy links, commercial networks and institutions deepen through the BRI, the barriers to China-Laos military cooperation are falling as well.
Laos is now much more than a landlocked, underdeveloped country wedged between China, Vietnam and Thailand. It is increasingly a strategic hinterland through which Chinese economic, political and security interests move without geographic barriers.
To be sure, the relationship’s power dynamics are lopsided. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Chinese institutions are Laos’s largest creditors, and the country remains in external and overall debt distress.
At the end of 2024, Chinese creditors held about 32.4% of Laos’s public and publicly guaranteed external debt. The IMF also notes that debt-service payments to China have repeatedly been deferred, including US$427 million in principal payments in 2024.
That does not necessarily mean China controls Laos or leveraged this economic disparity to push for access to the Ban Keun facility.
But it describes the setting in which military cooperation can deepen. Economic dependence, infrastructure links and defense ties now run on the same rails of the uneven bilateral relationship. Ban Keun adds a security layer to a partnership that already has developed considerable economic weight.
Budding air corridor
The most important question is not what China can do from Ban Keun today but what lasting access could allow it to do later.
Geographically, the site sits close to Thailand, in the space linking Yunnan with mainland Southeast Asia and within reach of a region where Beijing already has extensive economic and military ties.
Thailand is a US non-NATO treaty ally that also maintains defense ties with China. The depth of those ties has come under scrutiny after Thailand’s recent border clashes with Cambodia, which relies on Chinese-made military equipment and missiles for its defense.
China maintained neutrality throughout the conflict but has transferred new equipment, including corvettes for maritime operations, to Cambodia since the hostilities have died down.
At the same time, neighboring Laos and Cambodia have long been seen as sensitive in Vietnam’s strategic calculations, with China supporting armed forces opposed to the Hanoi-installed regime in Phnom Penh throughout the civil war in the 1980s.
Now, Cambodia has become increasingly important to China’s maritime strategy, including crucially in the South China Sea vis-à-vis the US. Together, these relationships give China multiple forms of military access without requiring a formal alliance system or permanent bases.
Indeed, China may be building a mainland Southeast Asian air corridor without announcing it. Rather than building what would be a highly controversial network of air bases, it is building up facilities where Chinese personnel can train, aircraft can operate, local forces can become interoperable and logistics can become routine.
Over time, the network’s strategic value could exceed that of any single installation. It also arguably changes how China’s rise in Southeast Asia should be perceived and measured – through access, not bases.
A runway in Laos, a naval facility in Cambodia and transport links between China and Southeast Asia do not overtly add up to an integrated Chinese military network.
But they form pieces of an architecture in which Chinese forces can increasingly operate beyond China’s borders without relying entirely on American-style permanent foreign bases.
That less-overt approach still complicates the strategic picture for Southeast Asian governments, though without forcing any of them to make a stark China or US strategic choice.
That is, Thailand need not pick between Washington and Beijing, Vietnam need not abandon its long relationship with Laos, Laos need not become a Chinese proxy, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations need not become a military bloc.
Ban Keun matters less as a leap in Chinese military power than as a sign of a patient effort to build up strategic depth in the region. The facility’s runway may remain quiet for years, hosting mostly Lao pilots and the occasional joint exercise.
Even so, China’s emerging advantage may come not from owning the most overseas bases but from having more places where its aircraft can train, operate, refuel, repair and return. That is how a potential game-changing air corridor begins: with the familiarity and operability access brings, and without a declaration of long-term intent.
Ronny P Sasmita is senior international affairs analyst at the Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution, a Jakarta-based think tank. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo.
Shawn W. Crispin contributed reporting and editing from Bangkok.
