Is China building an air base in Laos?

What the coverage shows

Both outlets focus on the same question of whether the Laos site amounts to a Chinese air base, and both note official reassurance from China and Laos that it is something else. The South China Morning Post frames it as a training centre that could unsettle Vietnam and situates it in Laos’s wider balancing act, while The Economist reduces the coverage to a sharper question-and-answer and says, in its extract, that the two governments call it a pilot school.

Written by Crossfiled from the 1 headlines and extracts below, not from the articles themselves. It describes how the outlets framed this, not what happened. Open any headline for a summary of that article.