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Mekong Memo Laos Weekly: Business, politics, finance, trade & legal news.

Jun 10, 2026

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All-Weather Friends, Whatever the Forecast

Thongloun Sisoulith finished his Beijing visit on June 6, having signed 32 cooperation agreements. The relationship also got an upgrade to what Xi Jinping is calling an "all-weather China-Laos community with a shared future in the new era," a phrase that does a lot of diplomatic work for a country that's carrying more than $18 billion in cumulative Chinese investment. The deals run the gamut of trade, finance, agriculture, energy, and human resources (training, mostly). Xi is also pushing a new "3+3" dialogue on diplomacy, defense, and public security that both sides say will help to tamp down on cross-border fraud. The last item is probably the most interesting - Vientiane handed nearly 500 telecom and online fraud suspects to Beijing in May. On the economic side, bilateral trade was $9.82 billion in 2025, up more than 19 percent year on year, and Xi is making noise about faster railway connectivity through to Thailand. Thongloun, for his part, said China's development was a "valuable reference" for Laos as it modernizes.

Read more: Asian News Network (AI corridor), CCTV (Li Qiang meeting), Laotian Times (visit timeline), CCTV (3+3 dialogue), CGTN (railway cargo)

Vientiane and Beijing Pencil In Twenty Billion

Bilateral trade between Laos and China has doubled since 2021, reaching $8.8 billion in 2024 (and then the aforementioned $9.82 billion in 2025). Both countries are now looking at a $20 billion target by 2030. The roadmap was hammered out in Suzhou on May 21, when Industry and Commerce Minister Malaythong Kommasith met his Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao. It covers energy security (especially timely since March's fuel crunch), electric vehicles, a domestic NPK fertilizer industry built on Lao potash reserves, and mineral processing. The fertilizer play is the sleeper story. Laos supplies the potash, China ships in phosphorus and nitrogen, and the finished product will remain mostly in-house. Beijing and Vientiane also renewed their currency swap agreement, which greases the payment rails that the Suzhou meeting had flagged as a priority.

Read more: Laotian Times (four pillars), TradingView (currency swap)

Vientiane's Villa Problem

Police raided a rented villa in Xaythany District on June 3 and hauled out 24 Chinese nationals, along with electronics tied to alleged telecom scam work. That was the cap on a week in which 73 foreign suspects were detained in both Vientiane Capital and Vientiane Province. The June 1-2 sweep through Vang Vieng, Keo Oudom, and Viengkham netted about four dozen more. Passports and equipment was taken from nationals of China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. The arrests come as part of a campaign that Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone ordered in late April and that’s racked up more than 1,000 detentions across the country in just the month of May, from 605 suspects shipped from Savannakhet to Vientiane on May 7 to a 27-person bust in Chanthabouly on May 26. On June 5, UNODC and the UK government brought partners together in Vientiane to talk about trafficking links, cybercrime, and illicit finance. British expert Rob Clark shared regional notes.

Read more: Laotian Times (arrest breakdown), The Lao Times (UNODC meeting)

Graduating Poor, Still Paying Tuition

Forest cover was reduced by 2.9 percent between 2000 and 2015, public debt tipped 131 percent of GDP in 2022, and only a third of Vientiane's estimated 970 daily tons of waste gets collected and properly taken care of. That's the balance sheet behind this year's UN least-developed-country graduation, an achievement that Vientiane’s been on the heels of since the early 2000s. Debt has since been reduced to 88 percent of GDP (year-end 2025), and poverty is down to 15 percent. The 2055 target to get to “upper-middle-income status” was set in January 2026.

Potash Pit Swallows a Village

Vientiane authorities met June 3 to start coming up with compensation rates for land, crops, and structures that were wrecked by sinkholes in Thongmang village, Xaythany district, though no figures have become public yet. Five holes have opened since May 2025, the biggest/ worse one on January 2, when one swallowed four villagers whose bodies were never recovered. Thirty-eight households have been evacuated, mining was stopped in July 2025, and ground stabilization work continues.

Thai Cavers Answer the Call Next Door

Lao PM Sonexay Siphandone sent a thank-you letter to his Thai counterpart Anutin Charnvirakul on June 7 and credited three Thai rescue units with helping pull five of seven villagers from a flooded cave in Xaysomboun Province's Longchaeng District. The men had been trapped by flash floods on May 20. The survivors were able to make an exit between May 29 and 30, after rescuers ferried supplies in and pumped water out. Teams stopped work inside the cave on June 6 after they thought that there were signs of a collapse forming at the entrance. Two villagers are still missing after more than ten days.

Bombs Outlast the Bombmakers

Michael Boddington, the British consultant who set up COPE in Vientiane in 1997, has passed away at the age of 84. What began as a small operation that made fitted prosthetics for amputees now treats about 1,500 patients each year. Lao staff have run it since Boddington previously stepped back from regular work in 2016. The problem of UXO continues to plague the nation. On March 27, a clearance team destroyed a 500-pound American MK82 bomb in a village near Luang Prabang; three days earlier, another team had taken out a similar one in Xiengkhouang province.

Read more: The Guardian (Boddington biography), Nikkei Asia (MK82 clearance)

Toyota Tsusho Brings the Factory to the Customer

Toyota Tsusho has set up a vehicle assembly subsidiary in Laos called Toyota Tsusho Manufacturing Laos. Production is scheduled to start in April 2028 and output is expected to best 5,000 vehicles a year. The trader has run Toyota's authorized dealership in the country since September 2018, and is now moving past finished-vehicle imports to knock-down assembly. It expects to have components shipped in before it puts them together locally. The Hilux pickup and Fortuner SUV will be the anchor models. Toyota Tsusho says the expansion is about price competitiveness and supply stability, since import costs and logistics have been squeezing margins. About 150 local jobs are expected to be created once the line is running.

Vientiane Swats Malaria Down to 269 Cases

Indigenous malaria cases in Laos fell from 15,497 in 2016 to 269 in 2025, a remarkable reduction of more than 98 percent. The success was shared at the 10th Asia Pacific Leaders' Summit on Malaria Elimination in Vientiane on Friday. Deputy Health Minister Phayvanh Keopaseuth has further ambitions, saying he wants zero indigenous cases by 2030. Throughout the Greater Mekong Subregion, confirmed cases fell by more than a third between 2015 and 2024.

Not Wine Vats After All

When archaeologists excavated a squat, collapsed stone jar on the Xieng Khouang Plateau in the winter of 2022, they weren't expecting to find ancient rice wine, but they also were not expecting to find what they did find: the jumbled remains of at least 37 people. Skulls were stacked around the rim, thigh bones laid across the edges, infants and adults together in a single multigenerational crypt. The find, published in the journal *Antiquity*, backs what scientists have long suspected. The Plain of Jars megaliths were communal ossuaries, used by Indigenous communities that first let bodies decompose elsewhere before gathering the bones for collective burial. Lead archaeologist Nicholas Skopal of James Cook University said it was a dig that left the team in silence.

EDL Pulls the Plug on Vientiane

Three Vientiane districts are losing power for stretches between June 5 and 9 as Electricité du Laos runs maintenance, equipment installs, and pole relocations. Sikhottabong gets the worst of it, with nine straight hours on June 7 in Nahae, Nonsawang, Dankham, and several other villages, from 8 AM to 5 PM. Soknoy village along the 450-Year Road in Xaysettha is getting eight-hour cuts from 8 AM to 4 PM on June 5, 6, 7, and 9. Near Patuxay Monument in Chanthabouly, residents will lose four hours on June 7.

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