6 - Vietnam, an Opening under Control, Lào Cai on the Kunming-Haiphong Economic Corridor

Summary

Created in 1992 with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank by the five mainland Southeast Asian countries and China, the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) is officially presented as “a programme of subregional economic cooperation, designed to enhance economic relations among the countries” (ADB 2009). The will to concentrate on economic matters is not surprising in the regional context of economic renovation and opening of the early 1990s. It is also to be understood as a pragmatic approach, taking into account previous integration experiments (the International Mekong Committee and ASEAN for instance) which all show the necessity of putting aside political constraints to emphasize concrete realizations. The GMS mainly concentrates on trade and operates following annual sector-based financing plans supported by varying members and donors. During the first decade (1992–2002), the GMS gave priority to transport infrastructures and developed a “corridor by corridor” approach based on five economic corridors which retraced the former caravan networks within the peninsula (Taillard GMS, this volume). Since 2002, the GMS has developed a more integrated approach to corridors which became development corridors, by emphasizing the linking of infrastructure improvement to the signing of specific free trade and free circulation agreements. It has also reinforced its territorial approach by creating three new corridors and enlarged its fields to the creation of industrial and commercial zones, interconnectivity improvement, human resources building and environmental conservation.

As suggested in its name, this new “Three Cs” strategy — connectivity, competitiveness and community (ADB 2009), links economic dynamics to the development of a greater sense of community. However this link is not evident — is a sense of community a precondition or a result of economic dynamics? — and ASEAN experiments tend to show that it is highly difficult to go beyond decades of isolation and disputes. This communication emphasizes the role of territorial representations resulting from such contentious situations. Such representations are considered as subjective but long-lasting factors which vary according to the level (or scale) and the actors considered. My hypothesis is that these representations impact on regional construction and transnational territorial construction in various, diffuse but significant ways.