On one side of Asia, Chinese engineers are trying to keep a deep-sea port alive in a state at war. On another side, Chinese freight trains are gliding through peaceful Laos toward Thailand. And in between, in India’s Northeast, loaded trucks still have to move under escort because a border state has not healed from violence that began on 3 May 2023.

Put those three images together and the new contest becomes clear: China is showing it can build connectivity through hard places; India still has to show it can build connectivity through its own territory. That is the real meaning of China’s push southward from Yunnan — what we can call its “western trident.”

Why the trident matters

Yunnan is China’s inland balcony over mainland Southeast Asia. If China depends only on the South China Sea, it can be slowed or blocked. If it can instead run two land arms out of Yunnan — one to the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar, and one to Thailand–Malaysia–Singapore through Laos — then Beijing suddenly has redundancy, leverage and influence. And the very existence of those two arms automatically tests India’s Act East Policy: if Delhi cannot keep Imphal–Moreh open and cannot work through a burning Myanmar, the comparison will not be flattering.

So this is not only a Belt and Road story. It is a delivery story.

Arm 1: Bay of Bengal — building in the middle of a war

The first arm is the most dramatic: Kunming–Muse–Mandalay–Kyaukphyu.

Kyaukphyu, on Myanmar’s Rakhine coast, is the anchor — a deep-sea port planned at about US$7.3 billion, with an already cleared first phase of about US$1.3 billion. It sits at the seaward end of the oil and gas pipelines that already run to Yunnan. If China can also finish the road and rail legs to Mandalay, it will get something every strategist in Beijing wants: a land bridge to the Indian Ocean that bypasses the Malacca Strait.

The problem is obvious: since the 2021 coup, Myanmar has been fighting almost everywhere this corridor needs to pass — northern Shan, Sagaing and Rakhine. In 2025 the Arakan Army fought the junta close enough to Kyaukphyu to make Chinese officials nervous. Yet Beijing did not walk away. It asked Naypyidaw to accelerate the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) and to protect Chinese workers and sites. That is classic Chinese pragmatism: keep building, even in bad weather.

Why should India care? Because a functional Kunming–Kyaukphyu chain would put a Chinese economic and strategic node right on India’s Bay of Bengal rim, across from the Andamans and uncomfortably close to where India is trying to make its own Kaladan link fully operational. If China reaches the Bay with overland cargo while India is still negotiating security in Manipur, the narrative writes itself.

Arm 2: Mainland ASEAN — the smooth corridor

The second arm looks calmer: Kunming–Laos–Thailand–Malaysia/Singapore.

Here China already has a success to show off. The China–Laos Railway has moved tens of millions of passengers and well over 60 million tonnes of freight. It has stitched landlocked Laos to Chinese supply chains and even to markets beyond ASEAN. In 2025, the route was promoted as an “ASEAN Express” — China to Malaysia in nine days — faster than many sea shipments. For businesses in Bangkok, Vientiane or Kuala Lumpur, this is proof that China can make continental logistics work.

There is, however, a bottleneck: Thailand. Bangkok’s own high-speed line, which should connect the Chinese/Laos leg to the rest of ASEAN, is running late and now targets 2030 as a realistic date. That is not what China wanted.

But even with this delay, the Laos–Thailand arm has two big advantages over the Myanmar arm and over India’s route: it runs through peaceful, investment-friendly ASEAN states, and it upgrades them to Chinese standards (finance, rail technology, customs). This is how Beijing quietly becomes the rule-setter in mainland Southeast Asia.

The hidden third arm: India’s Act East under scrutiny

China will never say “our trident is to test India,” but that is what it does.

India has told ASEAN, Japan and the wider Indo-Pacific that the Imphal–Moreh–Tamu–Mandalay–Mae Sot highway will be its land bridge. Then, in February 2024, Delhi decided — for valid security reasons — to scrap the India–Myanmar Free Movement Regime and fence the full 1,643 km border. Naga, Kuki–Zo and Mizo organisations objected, saying the fence cuts through villages, churches and family ties. That is exactly the part of India where Delhi wants to show openness to Southeast Asia.

Add to that the fact that Manipur has remained militarised and ethnically split since May 2023. When trucks have to move in convoys through your own territory, it is hard to persuade ASEAN or Japan that your corridor will be smooth and commercially reliable. India is therefore trying to deliver an external project through an internal crisis — while China is delivering its external project through someone else’s internal crisis.

Seen from Bangkok or Jakarta, the contrast is sharp:

China is pushing two overland routes despite a war (Myanmar) and a delay (Thailand).

India is struggling to push one overland route because of its own border-state conflict (Manipur) and the same Myanmar war.

That is why this becomes a performance test for Act East.

The bigger geopolitical picture

If China manages to get even partial operations going on the Myanmar side — for example, secure road convoys to Kyaukphyu plus the existing pipelines — and at the same time keeps the Laos–Thailand rail moving toward 2030, then Yunnan stops being a remote border province and becomes a continental hub. Laos, Thailand and Myanmar will have to talk to China all the time — on rail slots, on customs, on policing smuggling, on digitalisation. That is influence created not by speeches, but by daily logistics.

For India, this would have three consequences:

Manipur becomes foreign-policy terrain. It will have to be stabilised the way India protects the Siliguri Corridor — as infrastructure, not only as law-and-order.

Bangladesh and the Bay will stay important but cannot be the only working path. If the overland gateway stays unstable, India becomes dependent on Dhaka and on port weather.

India will need visible partners — Japan, Thailand, maybe even the EU — on its own northeast corridors so that they do not look like second-tier projects compared with CMEC.

For Japan, South Korea and the EU, the Thai delay actually opens a window. If they want to keep mainland ASEAN from being locked into Chinese rail economics, the time to co-finance and co-brand alternatives through India, Bangladesh and relatively calmer Myanmar sectors is now, before Thailand finishes its link.

What India can do — quickly

Put Imphal–Moreh on a protected schedule. Even if social reconciliation in Manipur takes longer, trade can move at fixed hours under security escort. Reliability matters more than speed.

Open more than one gate into Myanmar. If Tamu is unsafe on a given week, there should be alternative, smaller corridors toward Homalin or other Sagaing towns. Many small valves are safer than one big valve.

Keep external eyes on the corridor. When Japanese or ASEAN flags are visible on projects in Manipur and along the Myanmar border, it becomes politically costlier for local actors to disrupt them.

Make Manipur see the money. Customs, warehouses, workshops, border-trade services — when people see the income, they protect the road.

Why this is interesting now

Most connectivity projects in Asia are written as if politics were flat ground. China’s “western trident” shows the opposite lesson: the real contest is who can keep building even when the ground is shaking. Beijing is signalling that it is prepared to do that in Myanmar and to wait out Thailand. Delhi has the easier geography — its corridor runs across its own territory — but the tougher politics.

In the next five years, the winner will not be the country that announces the most corridors. It will be the country whose trucks and trains actually move every day through contested borderlands. Right now, China is behaving as if it intends to win that race. India still can — but only if it treats peace in Manipur, and workable arrangements with Myanmar, as part of its external infrastructure, not as side issues.

Note: This analysis draws on publicly available reporting on CMEC and Kyaukphyu, freight data for the China–Laos Railway, and the Government of India’s February 2024 decision to end the India–Myanmar Free Movement Regime.