Published: 10:48 PM, 09 September 2026
Bangladesh Needs a Corridor Doctrine Before It Chooses a Corridor
Sumaiya Azmi
Honorable Prime Minister Tarique Rahman came back from Beijing in June with seventeen signed agreements and memoranda behind him, plus a third joint communiqué in fifty years of Bangladesh-China relations. None of that ended up being the story. What dominated instead was a single idea Xi Jinping personally raised: the China-Myanmar-Bangladesh Economic Corridor, a proposed road and rail link running from Kunming in China's Yunnan province, through Mandalay in Myanmar, down to Bangladesh's coastal ports of Chattogram and Mongla.
A Proposal, not a Plan
The domestic reaction split into two camps, and neither one is worth taking seriously. One side is already talking about bullet trains to China within a couple of years, a clean escape from India's economic shadow. The other has dismissed the whole thing as Indian-media invention, a story built to needle New Delhi rather than describe anything real. What both camps skip past is the actual obstacle, and it has nothing to do with how excited or dismissive Dhaka feels about it. It has to do with a stretch of Myanmar that no government currently controls.
The Constraint Nobody Names
The corridor's critical segment passes through Rakhine State, and the Arakan Army holds fourteen of its seventeen townships. Near Kyaukphyu, the deep-sea port China is counting on to anchor the entire route, fighting has already gotten close enough that a $140 million Chinese-built power plant had to be dismantled and hauled away. The junta in Naypyidaw, which is who Beijing actually negotiates with, does not control the ground this corridor needs. The Arakan Army does, and it wasn't even party to the ceasefire China brokered with other armed factions in the region. A road cannot be engineered around a civil war it has to physically cross. Estimates for just the Muse-Mandalay rail segment run near $9 billion and a decade of steady construction, and that's assuming uninterrupted peace, which Rakhine hasn’t offered anyone in years.
Caution is Not a Strategy
Foreign Minister Dr. Khalilur Rahman has said publicly that Dhaka is only examining the proposal, has taken no position on it, and won't move without peace in Rakhine first. As far as it goes, that's the right posture, whatever else one makes of how the visit got framed for domestic audiences. But caution isn't a doctrine. Right now, Bangladesh has a holding position where it needs a strategy, and that gap won't stay hidden. It will resurface the next time any major power puts a connectivity project on the table, because geography has put Bangladesh at a junction that China, India, and the United States all have their own reasons to want a piece of.
The Hedge Without Terms
Hedging between three larger powers isn't naive. It's close to the only playbook available to a mid-sized state squeezed between them, and Bangladesh has run some version of it for decades. The problem is how it's being run now: project by project, visit by visit, which puts Dhaka in the position of reacting to offers rather than setting the terms those offers have to meet. Every Chinese-backed initiative, whether it's this corridor, the Mongla port upgrade, or the Teesta project, lands against a trade relationship where Bangladesh is importing nearly twenty-eight dollars of Chinese goods for every dollar it exports back, a bilateral deficit of $19.87 billion in the last fiscal year alone, and by far the largest trade gap Bangladesh runs with any country. Washington's tariff arrangement from earlier this year doesn't forbid dealing with Beijing outright, but it makes clear that deepening ties of this kind won't go unnoticed. Moreover, India is watching every step of this through the lens of its own Chicken's Neck corridor, sitting just across the border.
Write the Rules First
What's missing isn't more caution. It's a published, standing framework, a corridor doctrine, that spells out in advance what any large connectivity offer from any power would need to clear before Dhaka engages with it: real debt sustainability instead of concessional-sounding loans that quietly convert into leverage, verifiable security guarantees along the route, environmental and labour standards, and in this particular case, a binding link to safe and voluntary Rohingya repatriation rather than a vague nod toward stability. None of this would slow China down. Beijing has already shown it can wait decades on this exact route. What it would do is change Bangladesh's position from passive recipient of proposals to the party setting entry conditions, forcing China, India, and the United States to compete for Dhaka's approval instead of competing to extract it.
The Bangladesh–Myanmar–China corridor is a proposed regional connectivity route linking Bangladesh with Myanmar and China. It is considered strategically important because it can improve trade, transportation, investment, and economic cooperation among the three countries. The corridor is also connected to wider initiatives for regional integration in South and Southeast Asia.
For Bangladesh, better connectivity with Myanmar and China could create new opportunities for exports and imports. Bangladesh could gain improved access to Chinese markets while also strengthening commercial relations with Southeast Asia. The development of roads, railways, ports, and border facilities could reduce transportation costs and make the movement of goods faster and more efficient. Chattogram and other Bangladeshi transport hubs could potentially play an important role in regional trade.
Myanmar occupies a geographically significant position between Bangladesh and China. Its territory provides a possible land bridge connecting South Asia with China's southwestern region. For Myanmar, the corridor could bring infrastructure investment, employment opportunities, and increased trade. However, political instability, security concerns, and inadequate infrastructure remain major obstacles to realizing its full potential.
The Real Deadline
The corridor itself isn’t the urgent decision. Given where Myanmar's civil war stands, dirt is unlikely to move on this for years, maybe a decade. What's urgent is whether Bangladesh writes its rules down before the next proposal shows up, or keeps improvising a response each time one does. Judging by how this year's Beijing visit was sold at home, the evidence so far points toward improvisation.
Sumaiya Azmi is a researcher
and analyst with a background in
Public Administration, focusing
on governance and policy studies.
