China will keep on exporting electricity to its neighbors sharing the Mekong River, even though many parts of the country itself are suffering from acute power shortage and could face blackouts this summer, officials said here on Tuesday.

As many of the countries along the Mekong River are at the early stage of industrialization and are in desperate need of electricity, China felt obliged to help them, Li Xinhua, vice governor of Yunnan Province, a leading power exporter to the Mekong nations.

"Yunnan is close to those countries geographically, and therefore can provide them with cheaper electricity with greater convenience," he added.

Statistics show that electricity provided by Yunnan for its Mekong neighbors in the first five months of 2005 totaled 87.2 million kw/h, 16.2 times that a year earlier.

Yunnan, which lies along the Lancang River, the name for the China section on the upper reaches of the Mekong, mainly exports electricity to Myanmar and Vietnam.

Yunnan's power export to Myanmar has kept increasing by 40 percent a year since 1995. From September last to May this year, the province supplied 108 million kw/h of electricity to Vietnam.

According to an agreement between the South China Power Grid and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, China will supply 1.5 million kw/h of electricity per year to Thailand in 2013 and 2014.

China will also help Laos in its national electricity planning, and some Chinese enterprises have been chosen for this project.

Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam all belong to the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), as they share the same Lancang-Mekong River. The GMS countries are partners in a decade-old economic cooperation program initiated and sponsored by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

While China is faced with an unprecedented power and energy strain due to its sustained rapid economic growth for more than two decades, its GMS neighbors have also found power shortage a major bottleneck on their road to prosperity.

It is predicted that the five GMS countries bordering China will encounter a power shortage of 20.3 million kw/h in 2008.

To expand power cooperation, the six GMS countries on Tuesday signed the Memorandum of Understanding on the Guidelines for the Implementation of the Regional Power Trade Operating Agreement-Stage 1.

The MOU sets the unified rules for technical coordination in subregional power interconnection and a unified plan for the price of cross-border power transmission, which will serve as a powerful guarantee China's power supply to the GMS neighbors, said Shi Guangsheng, a senior official of the China South Power Grid.

"In the future, we will supply power to our GMS neighbors in a grid-to-grid or region-to-region manner, to ensure stable supply technically, " Shi said.

China's sincere cooperation with the other GMS nations in the power sector shows that the country is faithfully carrying out its foreign policy of good neighborliness and mutual development, said Zhai Kun, a researcher with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

"Such efforts are conducive to the establishment of a new international order characterized by mutual trust and mutual benefit," Zhai added.

Source: Xinhua