The airport is one piece of something far larger. In 2008 the Cambodian government granted Union Development Group, a Chinese-owned firm based in Tianjin, a ninety-nine-year lease over roughly 360 square kilometres of the Koh Kong coast — an area amounting to close to a fifth of Cambodia's entire coastline, and lying inside a national park. The project, valued at some 3.9 billion dollars and later folded into China's Belt and Road Initiative, was to include resorts, industrial zones, a deep-water port and this airport. Construction on the airfield began in 2018 on a 218-hectare site, with nearly a thousand more hectares set aside for supporting development. It was declared complete in 2024, after repeated announcements of imminent opening that came and went across several years.

Before the concession there were villages. More than a thousand families were affected as the development advanced; entire settlements were cleared and their residents resettled, with compensation that those families have consistently described as inadequate. Demolition proceeded with the involvement of private security and Cambodian armed forces. Years later — well after the runway was poured — households displaced by the project were still refusing the developer's compensation offers, which is a difficult position to hold against a state-backed venture and tells you something about how far short the offers fell. They were fishing and farming families on land their households had worked, inside a national park, and the arithmetic that moved them treated their presence as an obstacle rather than a claim.

Runways are read like tea leaves by defence analysts, and this one gave them a great deal to work with. A single strip designated 03/21, more than three kilometres of concrete, sits on a remote coast near Ream Naval Base — Cambodia's largest — in a country where China has invested heavily and the United States has grown steadily more uneasy. In 2019 the New York Times described a jungle airstrip stirring suspicion about Beijing's plans. The US Department of Defense has said openly that its concern rests on circumstantial evidence: the runway could host Chinese military aircraft, and the surrounding infrastructure suggests no such use. Both Union Development Group and the Cambodian government have rejected the interpretation outright, and Cambodia has repeatedly stated it would not permit a foreign military base on its soil.

The argument stopped being theoretical when the United States acted. In September 2020 the US Treasury sanctioned Union Development Group, citing corruption, the seizure of land from Cambodians, and the possibility that the development could host Chinese military assets. Sanctioning the developer of an airport is an unusual instrument, and it did not stop the airport. Construction continued and the runway was finished. What the sanctions did accomplish was to fix Dara Sakor permanently in a particular story — one about the reach of Chinese infrastructure finance in Southeast Asia — from which no amount of ordinary scheduled service is likely to dislodge it.

Strip away the geopolitics and a working airport remains, coded DSY by IATA and VDDS by ICAO, sitting a few metres above sea level on flat coastal ground. Day-to-day operations are not run by Union Development Group at all: the airport sits in the same Cambodia Airports concession, majority-owned by the French infrastructure group Vinci, that already runs Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville — a detail that complicates any tidy story about Chinese control of the site. Air Cambodia and Cambodia Airways both fly it to the capital. Beach resorts are meant to fill the seats. Whether they will is the question nobody has answered: the tourism boom that the whole Dara Sakor scheme was premised on has never quite materialised on this coast, and Cambodia's better-known islands lie further south, closer to Sihanoukville's airport. For now the terminal is quiet, the apron is largely empty, and the runway stretches away far longer than it needs to be — which is, depending on who you ask, either poor planning or the entire point.