From the New York Times:

In the dense humidity of northern Cambodia, where canoes are the common mode of transportation, a foreman from a Chinese construction company directs local laborers to haul stones to the ramp of a nearly completed bridge.

Nearby, engineers from the China Shanghai Construction Group have sunk more than a dozen concrete pylons across a tributary of the mighty Mekong River, a technical feat that will help knit together a 1,200-mile route from the southern Chinese city of Kunming through Laos to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand.

This is the new face of China’s foreign aid to poor Asian countries: difficult construction in remote places that benefits the recipient, and China, too. [Full text]