Satellite images taken days before the opening of China’s new facility in Laos showed the outline of an airfield built from farmland: an approximately 2,000 meter runway, an aircraft parking apron and five hangars at its northern end. The images, from Sentinel Hub on 22 September 2026, showed infrastructure suited to fighter jets, bombers and refueling tankers.
On 29 September 2026, Khamlieng Outhakayson, the Laotian Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister, attended the opening ceremony for the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center at Ban Keun Airport. The centre and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy formally began operations that day.
The opening gives China its first overseas air force base in Asia and its third disclosed military facility abroad. It also came as a surprise to the US, because Laos had not featured on the Pentagon’s list of likely locations for a Chinese base.
Ban Keun lies roughly 50 kilometers north of Vientiane, in Vientiane Province and close to the Thai border. Part of the new site occupies the location of Lima Site 44, an airfield built by the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War.
Google Earth photographs showed the runway at an early stage of construction in January 2026. China’s Ministry of National Defense announced the opening of the facility as the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center in September 2026, after the airfield had been built from farmland in approximately eleven months.
The centre is intended chiefly to train Laotian pilots. China and Laos will operate and maintain it jointly.
The Chinese Defense Ministry said the institutions “are not directed against any third party and aim to help further deepen practical cooperation between the two militaries and contribute to maintaining peace and stability in the region.”
China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, Africa, in 2017. The People’s Liberation Army also operates a naval facility at Ream in Cambodia, which became operational in April 2025. Together, the Ban Keun and Ream facilities describe an arch across the peninsula.
Hunter Marston, director of the Southeast Asia Program at Australia’s Lowy Institute, said the Laos facility “has the potential to become a more permanent base.”
Laos has become heavily reliant on Chinese investment and financing over the past two decades. It owes Beijing $10.5 billion, roughly 82 percent of GDP as of 2024, and has ceded 90 percent control of its national electricity grid to a Chinese state-owned operator.
For Vietnam, the new airfield adds to a Chinese military presence to its west in Laos, southwest in Cambodia and offshore in waters it claims. ISEAS survey data found that 88.7 percent of Vietnamese respondents were concerned about Chinese power, the highest level in the region.
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