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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2024
Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infrastructural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infrastructures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim.
The author would like to thank Darren Byler, Tim Oakes, Yang Yang, Tim Bunnell and Rachel Silvey who convened the third ‘China Made Workshop: The social life of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia’, 17–20 May 2021, at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore, to which this article contributed. He would also like to thank Dorothy Tang for her thoughtful and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.
1 Department of Planning and Investment (DPI), Investment potentials and opportunities: Luang Namtha province (Luang Namtha: Dept of Planning and Investment of Luang Namtha, 2013)Google Scholar.
2 Xi Jinping, ‘China and Laos: Working together for a community of shared future with strategic significance’, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-11/13/c_136749157.htm (accessed 12 May 2023).
3 Ibid.
4 Asian Development Bank (ADB), Development effectiveness brief: Lao People's Democratic Republic emerging from least developed country status (Manila: ADB, 2017), p. 5Google Scholar.
5 Simon Rowedder, Cross-border traders in northern Laos: Mastering smallness (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). This article draws on previous multi-sited fieldwork on cross-border traders, carried out between February 2015 and January 2016, January/February 2017 and August/September 2019, besides focusing on Luang Namtha province also covering Bokeo province and parts of China's Yunnan province and northern Thailand's Chiang Rai province. Originally, follow-up fieldwork was planned in 2020 and 2021 to initiate a new research project specifically focusing on local engagements with Chinese infrastructural development in northern Laos. Due to Covid-19-related travel restrictions, all fieldwork arrangements needed to be put on hold. As a consequence, facing some empirical limitations, this article is rather meant to provide some initial impulses to (re-)think research agendas and directions, and epistemological starting points, for more nuanced and meaningful studies of everyday lived Chinese infrastructures on the ground in Laos and beyond. Although these impulses already feed on reflections on an abundance of empirical observations rooted in long-term field research experience in the region, I hope that my propositions can be ethnographically further substantiated and enriched in the future.
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14 Laungaramsri, ‘China in Laos’.
15 Kearrin Sims, ‘High modernism in a small country: China “develops” Laos’, in Emmerson, The deer and the dragon, pp. 271–98.
16 Laungaramsri, ‘Commodifying sovereignty’.
17 Lyttleton, Chris and Nyíri, Pál, ‘Dams, casinos and concessions: Chinese megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia’, in Engineering earth: The impacts of megaengineering projects, ed. Brunn, Stanley D. (London: Springer, 2011), p. 1256Google Scholar.
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20 Alan Brown, ‘Laos's peripheral centrality in Southeast Asia: Mobility, labour, and regional integration’, European Journal of East Asian Studies 17 (2018): 229.
21 Strangio, In the dragon's shadow, p. 106.
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23 Programme booklet, ‘Third China Made Workshop: The social life of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia’, 17–20 May 2021, Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. See https://ari.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Program_as-of-May-4.pdf (last accessed 12 May 2023).
24 Anand, Nikhil, Gupta, Akhil and Appel, Hannah, eds, The promise of infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dalakoglou, Dimitri, The road: An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Harvey, Penny, Jensen, Casper and Morita, Atsuro, eds, Infrastructures and social complexity: A companion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; Larkin, Brian, ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42, 1 (2013): 327–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rippa, Alessandro, Borderland infrastructures: Trade, development, and control in western China (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Harvey, Penny and Knox, Hannah, Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
25 Tim Oakes, ‘The BRI as an exercise in infrastructural thinking’, Transformations: downstream effects of the BRI, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, 19 Jan. 2021 (last accessed 12 May 2023).
26 See, for instance, Lampton, David M., Ho, Selina and Kuik, Cheng-Chwee, Rivers of iron: Railroads and Chinese power in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Ho, Selina, ‘Infrastructure and Chinese power’, International Affairs 96, 6 (2020): 1461–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cheng-Chwee Kuik, ‘Asymmetry and authority: Theorizing Southeast Asian responses to China's Belt and Road Initiative’, special issue, ‘Southeast Asian responses to the BRI’, Asian Perspective 45, 2 (2021): 255–67. Cheng-Chwee Kuik also applies his ‘asymmetry-authority framework’ to explain why the Lao state as such fully welcomes and embraces China's BRI despite its potentially negative economic, social and ecological consequences. See Cheng-Chwee Kuik, ‘Laos's enthusiastic embrace of China's Belt and Road Initiative’, special issue, ‘Southeast Asian responses to the BRI’, Asian Perspectives 45, 4 (2021): 735–59.
27 Oliveira, Gustavo et al., ‘China's Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground’, Political Geography 82 (2020): 2CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 1.
30 Max D. Woodworth and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, ‘Exploring China's borderlands in an era of BRI-induced change’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, 1 (2020): 3.
31 Oakes, ‘The BRI as an exercise in infrastructural thinking’.
32 Hung, Eva P.W. and Ngo, Tak-Wing, eds, Shadow exchanges along the new Silk Roads (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
33 Strangio, In the dragon's shadow.
34 Hiebert, Murray, Under Beijing's shadow: Southeast Asia's China challenge (Washington, DC: CSIS, 2020)Google Scholar.
35 See Narins, Thomas P. and Agnew, John, ‘Missing from the map: Chinese exceptionalism, sovereignty regimes and the Belt Road Initiative’, Geopolitics 25, 4 (2020): 809–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.
37 Schendel, Willem Van, ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: Jumping scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 647–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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39 Oakes, ‘The BRI as an exercise in infrastructural thinking’.
40 See, for example, Sims, Kearrin, ‘The Asian Development Bank and the production of poverty: Neoliberalism, technocratic modernization and land dispossession in the Greater Mekong Subregion’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 36, 1 (2015): 112–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenney-Lazar, Miles, ‘Governing dispossession: Relational land grabbing in Laos’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, 3 (2018): 679–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenney-Lazar, Miles, ‘Neoliberalizing authoritarian environmental governance in (post)Socialist Laos’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, 2 (2019): 338–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baird, Ian G., ‘Degraded forest, degraded land and the development of industrial tree plantations in Laos’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35, 3 (2014): 328–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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42 Ibid., p. 408.
43 Ibid., pp. 407–8.
44 Oakes, ‘The BRI as an exercise in infrastructural thinking’.
45 Oakes, Tim, ‘The Belt and Road as method: Geopolitics, technopolitics and power through an infrastructure lens’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 62, 3 (2021): 281–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Rowedder, Cross-border traders in northern Laos.
47 See Rowedder, Simon, ‘“I didn't learn any occupation, so I trade”: Untold stories of transnational entrepreneurial experimentation in northern Laos’, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 35, 1 (2020): 31–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Jonsson, Hjorleifur, Slow anthropology: Negotiating difference with the Iu Mien (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2014), p. 49Google Scholar.
49 Rippa, Borderland infrastructures, pp. 12–13.
50 Simone, ‘People as infrastructure’.
51 Walker, The legend of the golden boat, pp. 111–12.
52 Tan, Danielle, ‘“Small is beautiful”: Lessons from Laos for the study of Chinese overseas’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 41, 2 (2012): 61–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tan, Danielle, ‘Chinese networks, economic and territorial redefinitions in northern Lao PDR’, in Transnational dynamics in Southeast Asia: The Greater Mekong Subregion and Malacca Straits Economic Corridor, ed. Fau, Nathalie, Khonthapane, Sirivanh and Taillard, Christian (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2014), pp. 421–52Google Scholar; Danielle Tan, ‘Chinese engagement in Laos: Past, present, and uncertain future’, Trends in Southeast Asia no. 7 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015).
53 Literally translatable as ‘numbing spicy soup’, Malatang is a common street food throughout China, said to originate from Sichuan province. At street stalls, customers can choose from a variety of vegetable, meat and noodles which then will be cooked together in a spicy broth, with the mala (‘numbing spicy’) flavour resulting from a combination of Sichuan pepper and dried chilli.
54 Although the exact etymologic origin and accurate meaning is not entirely clear, it is considered as a more or less established fact that the term ‘Haw’ started to be used in the various Tai languages of the Tai states in present-day northern Thailand, Laos and Xishuangbanna/China in the 13th and 14th centuries to refer to the Chinese traders coming from Yunnan who were perceived as different from Han Chinese from other parts of China. See Hill, Merchants and migrants, pp. 68–72.
55 Marsden, Magnus and Reeves, Madeleine, ‘Marginal hubs: On conviviality beyond the urban in Asia: Introduction’, Modern Asian Studies 53, 3 (2019): 758CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Chris Lyttleton and Yunxia Li, ‘Rubber's affective economies: Seeding a social landscape in northwest Laos’, in Bouté and Pholsena, Changing lives in Laos, pp. 301–24. Nonetheless, I have some reservations regarding their framing of these relations with the Chinese concept of guanxi. While I am fully convinced by their ethnographic descriptions of the relations as based on reciprocal material exchange and interpersonal affection and therefore understand why they chose guanxi, it risks a certain Sino-centric bias in explaining Chinese entrepreneurs’ performance and success through a key Chinese cultural concept that is often tied to Han Chinese morality. Lyttleton and Li are aware of this point, and justify the usage, arguing that ‘it encounters other cultural logics and frameworks of understanding as it travels across borders’ (ibid., p. 304).
57 Ibid., p. 323.
58 Roy Huijsmans, ‘Becoming mobile and growing up: A “generationed” perspective on borderland mobilities, youth, and the household’, Population, Space and Place 25, e2150 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2150; Sverre Molland, ‘Migration and mobility in Laos’, in Bouté and Pholsena, Changing lives in Laos, pp. 327–49.
59 Huijsmans, Roy and Lan, Trần Thị Hà, ‘Enacting nationalism through youthful mobilities? Youth, mobile phones and digital capitalism in a Lao-Vietnamese borderland’, Nations and Nationalism 21, 2 (2015): 209–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Singh, Bhrigupati, ‘Agonistic intimacy and moral aspiration in popular Hinduism: A study in the political theology of the neighbor’, American Ethnologist 38, 3 (2011): 430–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Ibid., p. 430.
62 Ibid., p. 431.
63 Zhang, Juan and Saxer, Martin, ‘Introduction: Neighbouring in the borderworlds along China's frontiers’, in The art of neighbouring: Making relations across China's borders, ed. Saxer, Martin and Zhang, Juan (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 11Google Scholar.
64 Ibid., p. 17.
65 See Simon Rowedder, ‘Railroading land-linked Laos: China's regional profits, Laos’ domestic costs?’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, 2 (2020): 152–61.
66 Although Muang Sing is only about 10 km away from the Chinese border, he had to detour more than 100 km to Boten where the only international border crossing is located. The crossing in Panghai/Chahe near Muang Sing (see map 2) is only open to border pass holders who are entitled to travel within Yunnan's Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture and Pu'er Prefecture. I was also operating under this restriction whenever I wanted to cross to China while staying in Muang Sing, as I am, as a third country citizen, not entitled to hold a China–Laos border pass.
67 This timeframe, explained to me in 2015, has already changed significantly as Kunming became in the meantime connected to China's rapidly emerging network of high-speed railways. Since 5 January 2017, travellers have been able to reach Shanghai in about eight hours and Guangzhou in about six hours. The latter train connection also dramatically reduces the travel time from Kunming to Guiyang to only two hours. Additionally, the Chinese section of the ‘China–Laos Railway’, opened in December 2021, drastically reduces the travel time between the Chinese–Lao border in Mohan and Kunming to only about four hours. Hence, it would now take only six hours, and not two days, to travel from the China–Laos border to Guiyang.
68 Suhardiman, Diana et al., ‘(Re)constructing state power and livelihoods through the Laos–China railway project’, Geoforum 124 (2021): 79–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The delayed and non-transparent resettlement and compensation procedures have been, despite being a highly sensitive topic in a climate of heavily restricted freedom of speech, reported by, among others, Radio Free Asia. See, for example: ‘As first Chinese high-speed train reaches Laos, villagers demand overdue compensation’, Radio Free Asia, https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/high-speed-train-10192021141727.html (last accessed 10 May 2023).
69 A very good example of a study explicitly addressing forcibly displaced people in Laos in the name of infrastructural development, and therefore harmed by ‘infrastructural violence’, is Sims, Kearrin, ‘Infrastructure violence and retroliberal development: Connectivity and dispossession in Laos’, Third World Quarterly 42, 8 (2021): 1788–1808CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 I must make clear here that I am fully aware of the potential limitation of the informants’ narrative accounts possibly being adjusted to or shaped by the specific presence of me as an outside ethnographer, allegedly standing for the tropes of modernisation and economic development which they seem to have, at least discursively to me, internalised.
71 See Miki Namba, ‘Becoming a city: Infrastructural fetishism and scattered urbanization in Vientiane, Laos’, in Harvey et al., Infrastructures and social complexity, pp. 76–86.
72 Sims, ‘Infrastructure violence and retroliberal development’.
73 Erik Harms, ‘Eviction time in the new Saigon: Temporalities of displacement in the rubble of development’, Cultural Anthropology 28, 2 (2013): 355 (emphasis in original).
74 Hansen, Arve, Bekkevold, Jo Inge, and Nordhaug, Kristen, eds, The socialist market economy in Asia: Development in China, Vietnam and Laos (Singapore: Springer Singapore; Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Holly High, Fields of desire: Poverty and policy in Laos (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), p. 108.
76 Sunthorn Phommasorn et al., Kansueksa phonpayod khong kansang thang lodfai khwamwaisung jin-lao [A study on the benefits of China–Laos high speed railway construction] (Vientiane: Research Center on China, National University of Laos, 2017).
77 Ibid., p. vi; pp. 16–18.
78 Yun Sun, ‘Winning projects and hearts? Three cases of Chinese mega-infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia’, The Asan Forum Special Forum, Sept.–Oct. 2017. https://theasanforum.org/winning-projects-and-hearts-three-cases-of-chinese-mega-infrastructure-projects-in-southeast-asia (last accessed 10 May 2023).
79 Laungaramsri, ‘China in Laos’, p. 200.
80 Tan, ‘Chinese enclaves in the Golden Triangle borderlands’, p. 141.
81 Ibid., p. 142, emphasis in original.
82 See, for example, Eyler, Last days of the mighty Mekong, p. 139.
83 Saxer and Zhang, The art of neighbouring.
84 See Al-Mohammad, Hayder, ‘Towards an ethics of being-with: Intertwinements of life in post-invasion Basra’, Ethnos 75, 4 (2010): 425–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 Stromseth, Jonathan, The testing ground: China's rising influence in Southeast Asia and regional responses (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2019), p. 1Google Scholar.
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