China has opened a military training centre at a newly built airfield in Laos, giving the People's Liberation Army (PLA) a foothold that one regional analyst called its first full-fledged base in Southeast Asia.
Sources indicate that China's Ministry of National Defence has claimed the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Centre and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy have now begun operating at Ban Keun airport in an area about 50 km north of the Lao capital Vientiane.
The same sources suggest the two institutions are currently run jointly by both sides and are meant to help Laos strengthen the training of its air force pilots, according to the ministry. It was also added that they were "not directed against any third party" although Taiwanese authorities as well as Japanese and a number of other Southeast Asian governments will be watching developments carefully.
The statement did not say what personnel, equipment or aircraft would be based at the site but commercial satellite imagery (see above) shows the site was cut out of farmland over the past year, with work starting in late 2025 and still going on in early September. A paved runway, a taxiway and new buildings now stand where only a rough dirt strip was visible until last year, Reuters reported on September 30. It is believed US forces used the same area during Washington's war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s.
The opening makes Laos the third country to host a PLA outpost abroad. China has run a logistics base in Djibouti in Northeast Africa since 2017, for years its only foreign military base, and it operates a joint training and support centre at Cambodia's Ream naval base on the Gulf of Thailand. Unlike Ream, Ban Keun sits inland, in a one-party state that borders China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar, and as such hands the PLA a runway in the middle of mainland Southeast Asia.
Rachel Vandenbrink of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said the "joint support and training centre" label suggested the PLA could be seeking "persistent access to a logistics hub that can support forces rotating through Laos", perhaps with a small forward support element.
"Unlike Ream Naval Base, this military logistics base in Laos is more ostensibly similar to the one in Djibouti," Collin Koh of Singapore's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies wrote on X. "It may not be wrong to conclude this is the first full-fledged PLA overseas base in Southeast Asia."
Phnom Penh has repeatedly denied any permanent Chinese military presence at Ream, and in January the USS Cincinnati became the first US warship to call at the base since its China-funded renovation. China also holds three island bases in the much disputed South China Sea, on Fiery Cross, Mischief and Subi reefs in the Spratlys, each with a 3 km military-grade runway.
Washington, which runs a large network of its own overseas bases of its own, has tracked Beijing's moves with suspicion. A Pentagon report had listed 22 countries where China may have plans for military facilities, and Laos was not among them, according to Reuters.
Thailand, which faces Vientiane across the Mekong River, said through its defence ministry's Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri that it respected Laos' sovereign right to make its own decisions but would "closely monitor developments".
Laos has a small air force that flies a handful of dated Chinese- and Russian-designed aircraft, and Lao troops have usually needed to visit Vietnam, Russia or China for advanced training.
The airfield now adds a military layer to ties with Beijing that are already heavily economic. The 1,035 km China-Laos Railway has linked Kunming and Vientiane since December 2021, and on September 18 the two countries launched a digital yuan payment link that lets Chinese visitors pay Lao merchants from their e-CNY wallets. Beijing has also been folding security co-operation into its diplomacy across the region, from policing to defence talks with Vietnam.
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