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  • Southeast Asia is a big place.

  • It's often geographically divided between Maritime Southeast Asia and Mainland Southeast Asia.

  • And something weird is happening in Mainland Southeast Asia when you pay closer attention to it on a population density map.

  • There's a sort of population void that's going on in the center of Southeast Asia that roughly lines up with the borders of Laos and Cambodia.

  • Indeed, both of these countries have tiny populations in comparison to their immediate similarly sized neighbors.

  • While Laos only has a small population of 7.9 million people and Cambodia about 17.6 million people,

  • Thailand to their west has a much larger population of 71.6 million people, while Vietnam to their east has an even bigger population than that at 101.6 million people, making it among the most heavily populated countries in the world.

  • And then the differences between them in terms of population density are even more stark.

  • Vietnam has an average population density of about 322 people per square kilometer, making it the population anchor of Mainland Southeast Asia and making it about as densely populated as other crowded countries like Japan and Pakistan.

  • Thailand's average density is much lower than Vietnam's at about 140 people per square kilometer, which is about the average of the Southeast Asia region as a whole, while Cambodia's density is only about 100 people per square kilometer, and Laos's is way lower at only about 34 people per square kilometer, only about one-tenth the average population density that's seen right next door in Vietnam, making them among the largest differences in population density seen between two bordering countries anywhere in the world.

  • And Laos's super low population density also keeps getting stranger the more you look at it at first.

  • Laos has by far the lowest population density seen anywhere in Southeast Asia, and it's the 8th least dense country located on the entire Asian continent.

  • That's more similar to countries in the deserts and the Himalayas than it is to its own immediate neighbors.

  • So why does this situation exist?

  • Why are Laos and Cambodia so much more empty than their immediate neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand?

  • For one thing, there are several notable geographic differences between these countries, especially in the case of Laos.

  • With an average nationwide elevation of 710 meters above sea level,

  • Laos is way, way more mountainous than any other country in Southeast Asia is.

  • And it's just as covered by dense jungles as well, meaning that the extensive mountain and jungle cover all across Laos makes developing its land more difficult and expensive than elsewhere in the region.

  • Largely because of all these mountains and jungles,

  • Laos also has by far the lowest amount of arable land in mainland Southeast Asia as well.

  • Only 6.2% of Laos's territory is considered to be arable and suitable for agriculture, compared to more than 20% of Vietnam's land, 22% of Cambodia's, and more than 30% of Thailand's land.

  • And because Laos is also geographically smaller than these other countries are, that means that Laos has only a tiny fraction of the amount of available land for agriculture as these other countries do.

  • Laos has only about one-third of Cambodia's arable land, one-fifth of Vietnam's arable land, and only about one-tenth of Thailand's massive amount of arable land.

  • But the availability of arable land in the cover of mountains and jungles does not explain the full picture.

  • Laos has about as much arable land as Slovakia does, and their populations are fairly comparable.

  • But Laos also has nearly as much arable land as South Korea does too.

  • And South Korea still has orders of magnitude more people.

  • And while Laos is largely covered by mountains, the Chinese province of Yunnan just to the north of Laos is even more mountainous with more than twice the average elevation.

  • And yet it also has nearly four times the average population density of Laos too.

  • Then Cambodia is by far the least mountainous, most flat country in mainland Southeast Asia, with an amount of arable land that's not too dissimilar from Vietnam.

  • And yet the overall density of people in Cambodia is still less than a third of what it is next door in Vietnam anyway.

  • So there's more going on here.

  • Part of the answer to the puzzle is that the quality of the arable land that's present in Vietnam is simply much higher than it is in just about anywhere else on the planet.

  • Out of the top five most agriculturally productive river deltas in the world, Vietnam controls two of them.

  • The Red River Delta in the north that's home to Hanoi, and the Mekong River Delta in the south that's home to Ho Chi Minh City, which is the second most agriculturally productive river delta in the world behind only the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta that spans across Bangladesh and India.

  • The Mekong Delta itself is massive at almost the size of the entire Netherlands, and it's almost as densely populated.

  • The region is covered in a maze of rivers and canals that bring enormous volumes of nutrient-rich sediment to the area downstream from the Mekong River source high up in the mountains of Tibet.

  • The Vietnamese government itself estimates that roughly 1 billion cubic meters worth of sediment is deposited by the Mekong River to the delta region every single year, which advances the region by between 60 to 80 meters into the sea every year as well.

  • All of this constant depositing of nutrient-rich sediment to the Mekong Delta constantly fertilizes the region's fields for agriculture, while the year-round humid and warm temperatures with massive rainfall levels enables farmers to carry out multiple crop cycles a year.

  • As a result, the Mekong Delta is one of the most productive rice harvesting regions in the world, where farmers can often produce three rice crops annually.

  • The region produces 60% of Vietnam's total rice harvest, which is why it's also known as Vietnam's rice bowl.

  • And then on top of that,

  • Vietnam also controls the fifth most agriculturally productive river delta in the world too up in the north around the Red River Delta.

  • The historical cradle of the Vietnamese civilization, the Red River Delta has similar advantages to the Mekong River Delta and produces another 20% of Vietnam's total annual rice harvest.

  • Even though it only makes up 5% of Vietnam's land, 30% of Vietnam's population lives here, and it's home to nearly as many people as in all of Cambodia and Laos combined.

  • Naturally, nearly 60% of Vietnam's huge population all just live in the flat and agriculturally productive regions around the Mekong and Red River Deltas, while Vietnam also just has a much easier ability to trade with its neighbors as well.

  • Vietnam has a really long coastline and it's also much closer to China's major population centers than the other Southeast Asian nations are, enabling them greater trade opportunities and better economic potential.

  • Cambodia has a coastline too, but it's much smaller than Vietnam's is, while Laos is completely landlocked, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia.

  • Laos especially is a pretty nerfed country when it comes to its ability to conduct international trade.

  • Not only is the country landlocked and has no direct access to the sea, but its borders along China, Myanmar, Vietnam, and much of Thailand and Cambodia are all almost totally covered by mountains, further boxing the country in in its ability to conduct trade.

  • To put the scale of Laos' isolation from its neighbors into perspective for you, its mountainous border with Vietnam is so remote and difficult to access that there is an entire species of megafauna that lives there that went completely undiscovered by mainstream science until the 1990s.

  • The saola is a large, bovine creature that often weighs around 100 kilograms, and their range is believed to extend across the remote border region between Laos and Vietnam.

  • Despite this, and despite tens of millions of people living in Vietnam nearby, the saola to date is the most recent living megafauna to ever be discovered by mainstream science, being only first reported on in 1992, and only first photographed and categorized in 1993, with very, very few photographs of it being taken ever since.

  • Moreover, even though the Mekong River runs for about 400 kilometers through Laos and forms most of its western borders,

  • Laos cannot use the river for navigation out to the sea like both Vietnam and Cambodia can do because of the existence of the Cone Falls here, basically directly on Laos' far southern border with Cambodia.

  • The Cone Falls are a massive obstacle to navigation along the Mekong, since it's actually the widest waterfall in the world at nearly 11 kilometers in width from one edge of its multiple channels to the other.

  • It is by far the largest waterfall in Southeast Asia, and it's the principal reason why the Mekong River has never been fully navigable from the sea all the way into China, and by extension, why Laos cannot use the Mekong River to conduct trade with the outside world through the sea either, while Cambodia and Vietnam further downstream of the falls can, further contributing to Laos' isolation, remoteness, and lack of economic opportunity that attracts people.

  • This is all why, in terms of GDP per capita,

  • Laos ranks very low and is among the poorest countries in the world today, with multiple sub-Saharan African countries having higher GDP per capita today.

  • After civil war-torn Myanmar and tiny Timor-Leste,

  • Laos has the next lowest GDP per capita in Southeast Asia, which further contributes to Laos' lower population density compared to all of its wealthier neighbors.

  • To an extent, these geographic differences explain part of the relative emptiness of Laos in particular, but they don't fully explain the relative emptiness of Cambodia, which basically doesn't have any of the geographic handicaps that Laos has.

  • Cambodia isn't landlocked, it has a major navigable river from the interior to the ocean, it's not covered by mountains that inhibit development, and it has tons of fertile arable land, and yet it still has only about one-third of the population density of Vietnam.

  • In order to fully explain Cambodia's present demographic situation, we have to dive back into Cambodia's deeply troubled history.

  • A very long time ago, the primary ethnic group of modern Cambodia, the Khmer, geopolitically dominated Southeast Asia.

  • The Khmer Empire at its height in the late 13th century controlled most of modern-day Thailand and Laos and southern Vietnam, including the whole of the Mekong Delta.

  • But shortly afterwards, the Khmer Empire entered into a period of steep decline and collapse during the 15th century around 600 years ago and entered into a sort of dark age.

  • The Vietnamese then began expanding and colonizing south during this period of Khmer weakness, while the flat ground of Cambodia itself became a frequent battleground between the Vietnamese and the Thai on either side of them, which kept Cambodia's population lower than it otherwise would have been under more stable conditions.

  • At the turn of the century in 1900, after both Cambodia and Vietnam had been taken over by the French,

  • Cambodia and Vietnam's populations were even more lopsided than they are now, with colonial Cambodia having only about one-thirteenth of the population of colonial Vietnam.

  • But of course, both Cambodia and Laos have experienced much more recent catastrophes that have negatively affected their populations and demographics into the present too.

  • Because the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, are probably the worst decades that either Cambodia or Laos have ever experienced in their entire civilizational histories.

  • Most of us in the Western world are pretty familiar with America's involvement in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, but a lot fewer of us are familiar with America's simultaneous involvement in Laos and Cambodia during that war that caused enormous destruction as well.

  • After the French colonial project in Southeast Asia was defeated and collapsed in 1954,

  • Cambodia and Laos emerged as independent kingdoms, while Vietnam was partitioned in half between a Soviet and Chinese-backed communist state in the north and a US-backed republic in the south.

  • North Vietnam then quickly began organizing, directing, and arming a communist insurgency in the south that was known as the Viet Cong.

  • And in order to supply and reinforce them around the heavily militarized north-south border,

  • North Vietnam began supporting another communist insurgency in neighboring Laos called the Path of Laos.

  • And then they invaded Laos in 1958 to establish what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex network of roads and trails that they built through the sparsely inhabited mountains and jungles of southeastern Laos.

  • The existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its use by North Vietnam to supply and reinforce the Viet Cong proved to be a major challenge to the US support of South Vietnam, especially because in 1962, the US signed an international agreement where they promised that they would respect Laos' neutrality and never invade the country.

  • So, rather than directly invading Laos with ground troops to try and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail that way, the US and the CIA decided to initiate a covert and massive aerial bombing campaign of the country instead that began in 1964.

  • For the next nine years until the US finally withdrew their troops from South Vietnam, the US Air Force carried out the largest and most overwhelming bombing campaign in human history across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all alike.

  • In Laos, the US Air Force targeted the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Communist Pha Thanh Lau positions with relentless and indiscriminate airstrikes.

  • More than 580,000 individual American bombing sorties were carried out across Laos over those nine years, which translated to one American bombing strike taking place in Laos roughly every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years.

  • More than 2 million tons of American bombs were dropped on Laos despite its neutrality status.

  • More bombs than the US dropped throughout the entire Second World War on both Germany and Japan combined, which also makes Laos the most heavily bombed country on a per capita basis in human history.

  • Virtually all of the bombs that the US dropped on Laos during this time period were also cluster munitions, which detonated in the air shortly before impact and sprayed dozens of miniaturized bomblets across the ground below.

  • The US used these cluster munitions to try and destroy as much of the Ho Chi Minh Trail's usability to the North Vietnamese forces as possible.

  • But as a result, the US also dropped an estimated 270 million of those little miniaturized bomblets across Laos' territory, and it's believed that roughly 30% of them failed to detonate upon impact, which means that about 80 million of those small American bomblets have remained hidden and active across Laos to this very day, leaving behind roughly 30% of Laos' territory that is still believed to be infected by massive volumes of unexploded ordnance.

  • Because it was run covertly by the CIA in order to prevent the American public from ever learning about it, the US government only formally acknowledged its secret bombing campaign in Laos in 1971, seven years after it first began, and they didn't just target militant Vietcong routes either.

  • They blew up Laotian villages and agricultural land that resulted in massive casualties, while there were numerous reports of American bomber pilots who failed to find suitable targets in Vietnam and then choosing to drop their payloads randomly on Laos instead of returning back to their base with unused bombs.

  • By the end of the campaign in 1973, it's believed that America's bombing campaign on Laos had killed roughly 200,000 people there, which was an astonishing 10% of Laos' entire population at the time.

  • Another 400,000 more Laotians were wounded by the bombing campaign too, meaning that nearly one-third of Laos' entire population were either killed or wounded by American bombing, while another 750,000 other Laotians were forced to flee and become refugees by it, all of which has left a significant dent in Laos' demographics that have lasted ever since.

  • Large amounts of Laos' preciously limited agricultural land still remains contaminated by unexploded bombs that are left over from this conflict, which continues to further restrict Laos' ability to grow food and develop, while more than 20,000 Laotians have also been killed by the unexploded American bombs since the war ended more than half a century ago now.

  • With around 80 million live cluster munitions still believed to litter the country, experts believe it could still take more than 100 years from now in order to fully clean out the country's infected areas.

  • Of course, Vietnam itself was also heavily targeted by the U.S. bombing campaign during the war too, and while numerically speaking more Vietnamese were killed during the conflict than Laotians,

  • Vietnam also suffered a lower percentage loss of its overall demographics than Laos did.

  • Between 1964 and 1975, Uppsala University in Sweden, which maintains the Armed Conflict Database, estimates that a total of 1,458,059 conflict-related deaths took place across North and South Vietnam among the Vietnamese population, which, if accurate, implies that roughly 4.3% of Vietnam's combined 1964 population would perish during the course of the heavy U.S. involvement in the war, compared to around 10% of Laos' much smaller population.

  • And then there's the utterly horrific case of Cambodia, which probably suffered the worst decade of its entire civilizational history during the 1970s, in which roughly one-third of the country's entire population would die in one of the most rapid and catastrophic civilizational collapses that has ever been recorded in history, which is a major part of why Cambodia remains more relatively empty than Thailand or Vietnam to this day.

  • By 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese were using Cambodian territory to supply and support the Viet Cong in the South along multiple fronts.

  • The Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran through southeastern Laos also extended across eastern Cambodia into South Vietnam, while another lesser-known but even more extensively used North Vietnamese supply route also ran from Cambodia's ports eastward into South Vietnam that became known as the Sihanouk Trail, named after Cambodia's then-king who maintained Cambodia's neutrality, but who also generally tolerated the presence of the communist Vietnamese and their supply routes going through his territory too.

  • A small homegrown Cambodian communist insurgency existed at this point too, known as the Khmer Rouge, that was steadily growing in the northeast and northwest corners of the country.

  • And in order to crush the communist supply routes across the country, then-U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger devised another, even more massive, covert bombing campaign that was also taking place in Laos.

  • Overwhelming American carpet bombing operations targeting the North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia began in March of 1969 and would continue on for years, despite Cambodia's neutrality status.

  • Classified data on the Cambodian bombings released to the public by the Clinton administration decades later in 2000 eventually showed that the U.S. dropped way more bombs on Cambodia than was initially believed by anyone before then.

  • That data showed that the U.S. dropped 2,756,941 tons of bombs on Cambodia over just a few years between 1969 and 1973.

  • More bombs than all of the allied nations collectively dropped everywhere throughout all of World War II, all on a country that's only about the size of the U.S. state of Missouri, and which overwhelmingly targeted the eastern half of the country along the border with South Vietnam.

  • The exact amount of death and destruction that was caused by this enormous American bombing campaign in Cambodia is still hotly disputed and unknown to this day, but most estimates put the death toll caused by it on the order of hundreds of thousands.

  • With most reliable sources estimating a figure of 300,000 or fewer deaths.

  • This overwhelming U.S. carpet bombing campaign and the massive civilian casualties it began causing across eastern Cambodia resulted in several cascading consequences.

  • At first, the U.S. bombing campaign sparked wide-scale protests in the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh against King Sihanouk, and his tolerance of the North Vietnamese and their supply routes in the country that had triggered the American bombings in the first place.

  • In March of 1970, with the bombing still ongoing, Sihanouk was overthrown in a coup d'etat while he was traveling abroad outside of the country, and he was replaced by his own firmly pro-American Prime Minister, Law Knoll.

  • The scale of involvement of the U.S. and the CIA in orchestrating this coup that overthrew Sihanouk has been debated ever since.

  • Sihanouk himself later claimed that the CIA was directly responsible for orchestrating the coup, while the actions of the subsequent pro-U.S. Law Knoll government, at the least, indicates that the U.S. probably wasn't too upset by the development.

  • Law Knoll quickly transformed Cambodia into a far-right military dictatorship, aligned himself to the U.S. and South Vietnam, and demanded that North Vietnam immediately withdraw all of its forces from the country, which they refused to do.

  • Then, two things supercharged what had previously just been the small, ragtag Khmer Rouge communist insurgency in Cambodia.

  • First, the overthrown King Sihanouk formed a government-in-exile in communist China, and began calling on Cambodia's rural masses to rise up and resist the pro-U.S. Law Knoll government.

  • On the advice of China, Sihanouk went so far as to ally himself with his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge, in a marriage of convenience to jointly fight back against the Law Knoll government.

  • Initially, Sihanouk then became the public face of the Khmer Rouge and their continued insurgency, which helped to surge their recruitment and popularity levels among the rural Cambodian population.

  • After Sihanouk personally visited the Khmer Rouge out in the field, it reportedly led to their ranks surging from only 6,000 to more than 50,000 fighters afterward, most of whom were at that point apolitical peasants who wanted to fight in support of their deposed king rather than for communism.

  • Then, at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge themselves,

  • North Vietnam launched a major offensive against the Law Knoll government in Cambodia in their support shortly after the coup and made rapid gains.

  • Within just three months of the coup that had removed Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese had managed to take over the entire northeastern third of Cambodia, and then they handed over this occupied territory to the local communist Khmer Rouge, further solidifying their influence and power even more.

  • The continued massive and indiscriminate U.S. carpet bombings targeting Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese forces in the east of the country also kept ravishing the Cambodian countryside and killing hundreds of thousands of people there, which, as time continued progressing, increasingly inflamed and radicalized the rural peasantry in Cambodia against the pro-U.S. Law Knoll government that was based in the capital city, along with the urban population that generally supported him.

  • The Khmer Rouge was able to adeptly exploit the overwhelming destruction of the Cambodian countryside caused by the U.S. carpet bombings for effective propaganda and recruitment drives, portraying themselves as the protectors of Cambodia from foreign aggression, in comparison to the perceived corrupt and pro-American central government, while they also utilized the American bombings as an excuse for their own increasingly brutal and radical ideology and policies that would soon devastate Cambodia even further.

  • All of this resulted in a gradual collapse of the Law Knoll government's control over the Cambodian countryside, and the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge and its reclusive leader, who would later be known as Pol Pot, in their place.

  • By 1973, the U.S. agreed to withdraw from Vietnam, and they ended their bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos as a result as well.

  • The former King Sihanouk had been largely sidelined by the Khmer Rouge by this point, and as the U.S. withdrew their backing of the Law Knoll government following their withdrawal from Vietnam, his forces began rapidly running low on ammunition and supplies and could no longer rely on American airstrikes either, which led to a rapid collapse of his government against the Khmer Rouge.

  • In April of 1975, the Khmer Rouge and their leader, Pol Pot, finally entered into and captured Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, putting an end to Cambodia's civil war that had raged since the coup that overthrew the King five years previously.

  • And this, unfortunately, is only when the true nightmare for Cambodia was just getting started.

  • Upon their seizure of power, the Khmer Rouge proclaimed the establishment of a new state in Cambodia that they called Democratic Kampuchea, which would become their canvas for arguably the most radical societal transformation ever attempted in human history.

  • Pol Pot and the new Khmer Rouge regime immediately proclaimed that 1975 was henceforth going to be known as Year Zero, the beginning of a completely new era in Cambodia's civilizational history in which everything that existed beforehand was going to be completely destroyed and eradicated.

  • Year Zero was intended by the regime to be a complete and thorough reset of all Cambodian civilization starting back from scratch, wherein all former cultures and traditions in the country would be totally destroyed, and Cambodia would be transformed back into a pre-industrial agrarian utopia free from all notion of classes and any knowledge of outside Western and capitalist ideas that they regarded as having corrupted Cambodian society.

  • In its place, a new revolutionary culture promoted by the regime would replace it from scratch.

  • Immediately upon seizing power, the first action that the new Khmer Rouge regime enforced upon Cambodia was ordering a complete evacuation of the entire capital city,

  • Phnom Penh, along with all of the other urban environments in the country as well.

  • Phnom Penh's population had swollen by an influx of nearly two million refugees from the countryside who had fled the US carpet bombing in the country, and so about two and a half million people lived there at the time the Khmer Rouge seized power.

  • Nonetheless, the Khmer Rouge forced nearly everyone to leave the city and to relocate themselves into the rural countryside, choking the roads out of the city with legions of refugees and leaving Phnom Penh almost completely abandoned.

  • The Khmer Rouge viewed the urban population in Cambodia with deep-seated resentment and suspicion, based on the fact that Phnom Penh had been the base of support for the previous Lon Nol government that had aligned itself with the US and welcomed the American carpet bombings that had ravaged the Cambodian countryside.

  • Urban city dwellers were generally treated by the regime as potential spies and traitors, and they were anathema to the Khmer Rouge's ambition to transform Cambodia into a nation of peasants.

  • The urban city dwellers in Cambodia who were forced into the countryside were referred to by the Khmer Rouge as new people, in contrast to the rural peasants in the countryside that they called base people.

  • These so-called new people were ordered by the Khmer Rouge to return back to the countryside for work, which is why they called them the new people, since they were new to the countryside where the Khmer Rouge had originated from.

  • The millions of new people in Cambodia were forced to march out of their cities to rural labor camps and hastily set up collective farms, where they were essentially treated as a mass of slave labor, constantly moved around and forced into the most challenging physical labor and the most dangerous environments.

  • New people and base people were completely segregated from one another in the country too, while the new people were given virtually zero privacy, no medical care, and were afforded the smallest amounts of food rations.

  • While they were frequently subjected to random and arbitrary executions for even the smallest of infractions, and they were constantly subjected to unending political indoctrination.

  • New people families were almost always torn apart and separated from one another as well, as family members were assigned to different labor camps across the country and forbidden to maintain contact.

  • Pol Pot's ambition was to completely transform the entirety of Cambodian society into a vast unpaid agricultural labor force that he believed would be capable of doubling the country's pre-revolutionary production of rice at the expense of literally everything else.

  • The result instead was catastrophic and enormous food shortages and famine, along with absolute economic collapse.

  • In the pursuit of radical and complete egalitarianism in Cambodia, all religions, money, banking, the concept of families and private property were all completely abolished by the Khmer Rouge.

  • While all of the country's citizens were forced into wearing the same identical simple black clothing every single day.

  • The only acceptable lifestyle under the Khmer Rouge was that of the agricultural rural peasant.

  • And so all of the country's factories, schools, universities, and hospitals were shut down by them.

  • While anyone who attempted to preserve them or resist in any way was ruthlessly persecuted.

  • Cambodia was to be utterly isolated from the rest of the outside world in order to eliminate all outside influence.

  • Nobody was allowed to travel anywhere or to leave the country without explicit government permission.

  • While all knowledge of anything in the country prior to year zero was prohibited.

  • The regime attempted to destroy all recorded memory of society in Cambodia before year zero by destroying books and even by outlawing publishing.

  • While even wearing eyeglasses was criminalized as they felt it was a sign that someone might habitually read books from before year zero.

  • The traditional education system in Cambodia was also treated by the Khmer Rouge with ruthless hostility.

  • In addition to completely evacuating all of the cities immediately after they took over power, the Khmer Rouge also immediately began executing thousands of Cambodia's teachers.

  • While those who survived were only able to do so by concealing their identities.

  • Other than teaching very rudimentary math and literacy, the new education system established by the Khmer Rouge was designed to only instill revolutionary fervor and values in the country's youth.

  • In addition to the former urban city dwellers, other classes of people across Cambodia were ruthlessly persecuted by the new regime as well.

  • All professionals and intellectuals in the country, which extended to basically everyone who possessed a university education.

  • Anyone who understood an outside foreign language.

  • Lawyers, doctors, clergy, engineers, teachers, and even people who simply wore eyeglasses.

  • Anybody who had any connections to the former Law Nol government and the country's tens of thousands of practicing Buddhist monks.

  • Whom the regime began methodically massacring.

  • Anybody who was discovered by the Khmer Rouge's authorities to be praying or expressing any religious sentiment faced the labor camps or executions.

  • The Christian and Muslim faiths in Cambodia were also both deemed by the Khmer Rouge regime to be a corrupt, hostile influence from the outside world.

  • And their followers were also both relentlessly persecuted.

  • In their drive to also ethnically cleanse Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge also legally banned by decree the entire existence of non-Khmer ethnic minorities in the country.

  • Including the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Muslim practicing Cham people, and 20 other minority groups in the country that collectively made up 15% of Cambodia's population in 1975.

  • The ethnic Vietnamese minority in Cambodia was almost entirely massacred by the Khmer Rouge regime or forced across the border as refugees into Vietnam.

  • Along with tens of thousands of the Muslim practicing

  • Cham people.

  • By 1976, within just one year of the Khmer Rouge taking over the country, famine in Cambodia was already evident and food was scarce for the entire civilian population.

  • As the little food that was produced was given top priority to the army and even exported abroad to earn money for weapons.

  • The closure of all of the country's hospitals and the persecution of all of the country's doctors completely crashed

  • Cambodia's healthcare infrastructure and sanitation.

  • While the vast numbers of internal enemies in the country declared by the Khmer Rouge led to an almost unbelievable level of executions and killings that have rarely been seen in history before or since.

  • All across the remote rural areas of the country, the Khmer Rouge regime engaged in mass executions of their declared enemies and so-called new people in infamous areas that have since become known as the Cambodian killing fields.

  • Within only the short three years and 10 months that the Khmer Rouge regime survived for in Cambodia and across more than 20,000 known locations of mass graves that have been discovered in the rural killing fields, the regime deliberately executed a staggering total of at least 1,386,734 of their own people, equivalent to about 18% of the entire Cambodian population at the time they took power in 1975.

  • All on its own, a higher percentage of death inflicted on Cambodia's own population than Poland suffered during the entire six years of the Second World War.

  • And in addition to the enormous numbers of deliberate executions, runaway famine and rampant diseases because of the Khmer Rouge's misguided policies claimed hundreds of thousands of other lives in Cambodia during their short rule as well.

  • Adding in these numbers, the generally cited total death toll in Cambodia that was caused by the Khmer Rouge regime through executions, overworked labor, starvation and disease during the three years and 10 months that they ruled the country is around 2 million people, equal to about 26% of the entire country's 1975 population getting wiped out.

  • More than two and a half times the percentage of total population lost in Rwanda during the genocide they experienced in the 1990s.

  • Which is why the events that took place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge's regime is often called the Cambodian Genocide.

  • Hundreds of thousands of other Cambodians also fled the country during this time period into Thailand and Vietnam and also to the US,

  • France and Australia's refugees, many of whom never again returned back to the country.

  • The enormous chaos and upheaval caused by the Khmer Rouge's policies also led to an absolute cratering in Cambodia's fertility rate, down to somewhere between one half to three fourths of Cambodia's pre-war levels.

  • Which suggests that during the three years and 10 months that the Khmer Rouge regime survived, there were somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 births that never happened that probably otherwise would have.

  • Further contributing to Cambodia's present demographic state and relative emptiness compared to its neighbors.

  • In late 1978, drunk on their own ambitions and brutality, the Khmer Rouge's delusions of grandeur led them to believe that they could also somehow restore the ancient Khmer Empire's borders across Southeast Asia from seven centuries prior that extended across modern-day Thailand,

  • Laos and Southern Vietnam.

  • These delusions among the Khmer Rouge regime eventually led to a rapid deterioration in their relations with their former allies who had catapulted them into power,

  • Communist Vietnam.

  • As the Khmer Rouge massacred tens of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese within Cambodia, border clashes between Khmer Rouge troops and Vietnamese troops escalated along all of Cambodia's borders in 1977.

  • And then in April of 1978,

  • Khmer Rouge troops actually invaded Vietnam across the border where in just 12 days they'd massacred 3,157 Vietnamese civilians.

  • Vietnam finally decided that that attack effectively constituted an act of war.

  • And by October of that year, no longer willing to tolerate a hostile and belligerent regime next door,

  • Vietnam decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge regime and its violent excesses by force.

  • The battle-hardened

  • Vietnamese army that was well-equipped by the Soviets and that had resisted the American army for decades proved to make rapid work of the inexperienced, starving and poorly-equipped

  • Khmer Rouge troops in Cambodia.

  • Within only a few months, by January of 1979, they had already reached the Cambodian capital while Pol Pot and the remaining

  • Khmer Rouge government fled the city for the mountains and jungles in the northwest along the border with Thailand where they would maintain an active insurgency into the early 1990s before finally agreeing to peace.

  • Vietnamese troops would then occupy Cambodia for the next decade until 1989 in order to stabilize the country after the catastrophic mismanagement of the Khmer Rouge regime.

  • And the first free elections in Cambodia's entire history were finally held in 1993, which began the current era of a democratic government in the country.

  • Overall, throughout the decade of the 1970s,

  • Cambodia experienced an overwhelming

  • U.S. carpet-bombing campaign across the country that likely killed hundreds of thousands of people, a five-year-long full-scale civil war between a pro-U.S. government and communist insurgents that probably killed several hundred thousand more, and then a hyper-radical

  • Maoist-style regime under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge that carried out a genocide that killed another two million more people, which collectively resulted in around one-third of the Cambodian population in 1970 not surviving by the end of the decade, which has left deep, lasting demographic scars on Cambodian society that can still be clearly seen today on the country's population pyramid.

  • Had the terrible events of the 1970s in Cambodia never taken place, the Cambodian population today would probably have ended up closer to around 25 million people rather than the 17.6 million it actually is, meaning that all of the devastation suffered in Cambodia during the 1970s has meant that there are a missing 7 million or so people who otherwise would be alive in the country today.

  • In other words, had the events of the 1970s never happened in Cambodia,

  • Cambodia's population density today would probably be about the same as Thailand's and the Southeast Asian average, and it wouldn't be the relative anomaly that it is today.

  • Since then, though,

  • Cambodia has made remarkable progress in recovery.

  • Since the Vietnamese withdrew from the country in 1989, the Cambodian population has more than doubled, while the country's fertility rate continues to remain high above the 2.1 replacement rate at 2.3 children per woman.

  • Laos' population is also still growing with a fertility rate of 2.4 children per woman, while Thailand and Vietnam are both beginning to shrink.

  • Vietnam's fertility rate remained high and above the replacement rate until very recently in 2023.

  • So Vietnam's population will probably not be shrinking for decades until the 2050s, while Thailand's fertility rate fell below the replacement rate all the way back in 1993, and it's currently among the lowest in the entire world at just one child per woman, less than half of the fertility rates that are seen in Laos and Cambodia.

  • Thailand's population actually began shrinking in 2021 as a result of this, while Cambodia and Laos will continue growing for some time to come.

  • Perhaps in the not too distant future, neither Cambodia or Laos will appear as relatively empty to Vietnam and Thailand as they do today, despite the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War era and the demographic shadow of the Khmer Rouge era that continues hanging over Cambodia.

  • Now, there's a lot of data that goes into producing these kinds of videos, whether it's visually showing you the scale of the population density that's seen across Southeast Asia today, detailing out where all of the arable land can be found across this region, or showing you where

  • American bombing campaigns took place in eastern Cambodia that triggered that country's instability and the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

  • The ability to actually visualize raw data like this on the map instead of just reading about it in a text format is exactly what makes learning about these kinds of complicated geopolitical subjects so fascinating to me.

  • And it's why the Exploring Data

  • Visually course is one of my favorite courses that I've ever taken with this video's sponsor, Brilliant.

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Southeast Asia is a big place.

Subtitles and vocabulary

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B2 cambodia khmer khmer rouge rouge vietnam population

Why Cambodia & Laos Are Absurdly Empty

  • 241 29
    林宜悉 posted on 2025/06/17
Video vocabulary

Keywords

entire

US /ɛnˈtaɪr/

UK /ɪn'taɪə(r)/

  • adjective
  • Complete or full; with no part left out; whole
  • (Botany) Having a smooth edge, without teeth or divisions.
  • Undivided; not shared or distributed.
  • Whole; complete; with nothing left out.
massive

US /ˈmæsɪv/

UK /ˈmæsɪv/

  • adjective
  • Very big; large; too big
  • Extensive in scale or scope.
  • Solid and heavy.
  • Exceptionally large; huge.
  • Large or imposing in scale or scope.
overwhelming

US /ˌovɚˈhwɛlmɪŋ, -ˈwɛl-/

UK /ˌəʊvəˈwelmɪŋ/

  • adjective
  • So great as to be impossible to resist or overcome.
  • Impossible to resist
  • Very great or very strong; so powerful that you cannot resist or decide how to react
  • So strong as to be difficult to resist or overcome.
  • Very great or very strong; so powerful that you cannot resist it or decide how to react.
  • Covering completely
  • Having too much to handle (e.g. work)
  • Very great or very strong; so powerful that you cannot resist it or decide how to react.
  • Very great or very strong; so powerful that you cannot resist or decide how to react
  • Difficult to deal with; very large or greater than usual
  • other
  • To cover someone or something completely; to submerge.
  • Present participle of overwhelm; completely defeating someone or something.
  • To defeat someone or something by using a lot of force
  • To have a strong emotional effect on somebody
  • Present participle of overwhelm; affecting someone very strongly.
  • To cover or submerge completely.
  • To cover somebody/something completely
  • verb
  • To defeat something or someone completely
  • Present participle of overwhelm: to affect (someone) very strongly.
  • To affect someone emotionally in a strong way
  • Present continuous of overwhelm; strongly affecting
  • To cause to have too much to handle (e.g. work)
  • To affect someone very strongly.
enormous

US /ɪˈnɔrməs/

UK /iˈnɔ:məs/

  • adjective
  • Huge; very big; very important
  • Very great in size, amount, or degree.
  • Having a very great effect or influence.
  • Very great in number or amount.
  • Extremely large; huge.
scale

US /skel/

UK /skeɪl/

  • noun
  • Size, level, or amount when compared
  • Small hard plates that cover the body of fish
  • Device that is used to weigh a person or thing
  • An instrument for weighing.
  • A sequence of musical notes in ascending or descending order.
  • Range of numbers from the lowest to the highest
  • The relative size or extent of something.
  • Dimensions or size of something
  • verb
  • To adjust the size or extent of something proportionally.
  • To change the size of but keep the proportions
  • To climb something large (e.g. a mountain)
  • To climb up or over (something high and steep).
  • To remove the scales of a fish
average

US /ˈævərɪdʒ, ˈævrɪdʒ/

UK /'ævərɪdʒ/

  • noun
  • Total of numbers divided by the number of items
  • verb
  • To add numbers then divide by the number of items
  • adjective
  • Typical or normal; usual; ordinary
campaign

US /kæmˈpen/

UK /kæm'peɪn/

  • noun
  • Series of actions meant to achieve a goal
  • A planned set of military activities intended to achieve a particular objective.
  • A series of military operations intended to achieve a particular objective, confined to a specific area or involving a specified type of fighting.
  • A series of planned activities designed to achieve a particular aim.
  • A series of planned activities designed to achieve a particular aim.
  • A series of planned activities designed to achieve a particular social, political, or commercial aim.
  • verb
  • To work in an organized, active way towards a goal
  • other
  • To work in an organized and active way towards a particular goal, typically a political or social one.
  • other
  • To promote or advocate for something in a planned and active way.
completely

US /kəmˈpliːtli/

UK /kəmˈpli:tli/

  • adverb
  • In every way or as much as possible; totally.
  • In every way or as much as possible
  • Totally; entirely.
  • To the greatest extent; thoroughly.
  • In every way or as much as possible; totally.
  • Including all or everything; without anything lacking.
  • Thoroughly; to a full or finished extent.
  • Totally; in every way or as much as possible.
force

US /fɔrs, fors/

UK /fɔ:s/

  • other
  • To break open (something) using force.
  • To compel (someone) to do something.
  • To cause (a plant or crop) to develop or mature prematurely in a greenhouse or under artificial conditions.
  • To cause (a plant or flower) to grow or develop at an increased rate.
  • To use physical strength to break open or move (something).
  • other
  • Coercion or compulsion; strength or power exerted to cause motion or change.
  • Strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.
  • other
  • Coercion or compulsion; strength or power exerted to cause or affect.
  • An influence or effect.
  • Physical strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.
  • Strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.
  • noun
  • Coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.
  • Group of persons trained for military action; army
  • A body of people employed and trained for a particular task or purpose.
  • An influence or effect.
  • A body of people employed and trained for law enforcement.
  • A body of soldiers or police.
  • An influence that can cause a body to accelerate.
  • Pressure; attraction
  • Strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.
  • The use of physical strength/violence to persuade
  • Strength or power of expression or argument.
  • verb
  • To use physical strength or violence to persuade
productive

US /prəˈdʌktɪv, pro-/

UK /prəˈdʌktɪv/

  • adjective
  • Producing or able to produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities.
  • Producing things in large quantities; fertile
  • Producing or able to produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities.
  • Doing a lot of work and achieving a lot
  • Achieving a significant amount or result; efficient.
  • Capable of generating or producing something, especially crops.
  • Producing or capable of producing a large amount of something.
  • Concerning speaking or writing
  • (Of a linguistic element) able to form new words.
  • Serving a useful purpose; contributing to something.