The Chearavanonts, Thailand’s richest family, are getting richer helping China

Chia Ek Chor fled his typhoon-ravaged village in southern China and started a new life in Thailand selling vegetable seeds with his brother in 1921. Almost a century later, with the largest family fortune in the country, his descendants are becoming Chinese President Xi Jinping’s key economic allies.

Chia’s son Dhanin Chearavanont is senior chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group, a vast conglomerate that is the world’s biggest producer of animal feed, shrimp as well as a top telecom firm in Thailand. It is at the centre of an ambitious plan to turn Thailand’s eastern seaboard into a tech hub with bullet trains, 5G networks and smart car factories.

The so-called Eastern Economic Corridor is the flagship programme of Thailand’s military regime, a bid to leverage Japanese investment and Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Huawei to revive an economy that grew 4.1 per cent last year, the slowest rate in emerging Southeast Asia. But a messy March 24 general election means that projects could come under greater scrutiny as critics accuse authorities of dispossessing local farmers to make way for Chinese investors. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.

“Locals would be downgraded to second-class citizens,” said Somnuck Jongmeewasin, a lecturer at Silpakorn University’s International College, who studies the EEC. “A colonial era is emerging in the EEC area through Thai-Chinese investment policies.”

Xi’s signature “Belt and Road Initiative” has come under fire in countries including Sri Lanka and Malaysia for infrastructure projects that were seen as providing little benefit for the host nations, while saddling them with heavy debts. But the military junta that seized power in Thailand in a 2014 coup has embraced the alliance, promising a 1.7 trillion-baht (US$53 billion) investment to develop three coastal provinces close to the capital – Chachoengsao, Chonburi and Rayong.