"Under fire for bullying neighbors in the South China Sea, China is patting itself on the back for the progress it is making on the 411-kilometer China-Laos railway through a sparsely populated nation that has barely been touched by the Covid-19 pandemic. The official Xinhua News Agency reported on April 25 that all the beams are now in place for the 1,458-meter Luang Prabang cross-Mekong super-bridge, one of the biggest undertakings on a track that includes 169 other bridges and 72 mountain-blasting tunnels. Construction resumed on the signature Belt and Road project only 23 days after Vientiane’s communist government closed its borders on April 1 with China, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia in response to the discovery of its eighth Covid-19 case. Although there is skepticism about the official figures, landlocked Laos still has only 19 confirmed coronavirus infections among its 7.3 million people, less than any of the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states, ahead of Cambodia (122), Myanmar (178) and Vietnam (288)..."