Part 2 of a three-part series, Crossing Borders: Chinese Agricultural Investment in Southeast Asia, this post considers the complexities of Chinese rubber plantations and sovereignty in northern Laos. Part 1 examined northern Burma while part 3 will look at southern Laos.
Over the last few years, the borderlands of northern Laos have been much in the news. If most of the initial interest was on the combination of infrastructure and Chinese agribusiness that flowed into Laos (especially Luang Namtha province) in the mid-2000s,[1] recent attention has focused on a pair of Chinese casinos that sprung up in the last few years in Boten and Tonpheung, at either end of the so-called Northern Economic Corridor (Fig. 1). As the casinos have turned ugly – drugs, prostitution, money laundering, even kidnapping and torture[2] – they have re-raised a question that hung in the air during the earlier investment boom: Is northern Laos turning into Chinese territory?
Fig. 1. Northern Lao borderlands
Using Laos’s northern borderlands as their empirical launching pad, the anthropologists Chris Lyttleton and Pál Nyíri have recently suggested that colonial-era “extraterritoriality” in coastal China has much to tell us about China’s so-called peaceful ascent today.[3] Noting the parallels – and in particular the uncomfortable mix of humiliation and modernization – between the colonial-era treaty ports and a growing archipelago of Chinese development zones in the global south, Nyíri and Lyttleton posit a “return of the concession” exemplified by the casinos at Boten and Tonpheung. Walking around Golden Boten City, they are told “Sure it’s China! China rented it”, and put this slippage from property to territory in general terms:
It appears that the environment simply feels too foreign for small Lao entrepreneurs, unfamiliar with Chinese business practices, to move in, and that both proprietors and visitors see the place as a kind of liminal Chinese space…rather than a foreign destination.[4]
Citing a range of other locations – the Special Regions of Burma’s Shan State (see Woods, Part I), the mountains of northern Cambodia, the Lake Victoria East Africa Free Trade Zone, to name a few – Nyíri and Lyttleton see the casinos at Boten and Tonpheung as pieces of “a remarkably similar silhouette of extraterritoriality” that is, as Nyíri put it in a 2009 lecture, “emerging around Chinese concessions in various places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and the Pacific as China becomes an increasingly significant overseas investor and development aid donor.”[5]
Last December, only weeks after the publication of TNI’s “Alternative Development or Business as Usual? China’s Opium Substitution Policy in Burma and Laos” (see Part I), the Asia Times Online made the somewhat inevitable – but nonetheless dubious, as I will explain – leap from the special zones along the border to the rubber fields of Laos’s northwestern interior. Taking a page from Lyttleton and Nyíri, the Times Online’s Southeast Asia Editor uses a traffic accident at the casino in Boten to anchor his article’s more expansive thesis: “The absence of any uniformed Lao police officers underscored the authority gap in a growing number of areas in the country where Vientiane has effectively ceded sovereignty to Beijing.”[6] In the analysis that follows, TNI’s report figures centrally, providing much of the backup for the Times Online’s account of China’s “exploitive expansion” beyond the special zones along the border.
In northern Laos, China’s expansion is especially visible in the mountainous areas south of Boten, where once forested areas have been cleared for monoculture rubber plantations managed by Chinese companies. Those companies frequently receive tax waivers and subsidies from Beijing as part of a wider policy to combat opium cultivation and better integrate remote Lao and Myanmar border areas into wider regional markets, according to the Transnational Institute (TNI), a Netherlands-based international network of researchers and activists.
In a November briefing paper, TNI wrote that while “initially informal smallholder arrangements were the dominant form of [rubber] cultivation in Laos, the top down coercive model is gaining prevalence” and that “the poorest of the poor … benefit least from these investments.” The study also noted that many Lao agrarians “were losing access to land and forest” and “were being forcibly relocated to lowland areas that offered few viable options for survival” to make way for Chinese plantations.[7]
In late 2007, about a year before Luang Namtha’s rubber planting boom slowed down, I visited a village that was in the process of being enrolled into these projects. My experience causes me to question claims of growing Chinese sovereignty over Laos’s upland interior, and emphasizes the complexity of the relationship between Chinese investment projects, dispossession and resettlement.[8] This village, which I will call Ban Deng, highlighted the need to look specifically and historically at not just particular projects, but even particular parts of particular projects.
The picture that emerges is hardly one in which Beijing is displacing Vientiane as the seat of sovereignty in the Lao hinterland. On the contrary, Ban Deng is a case of what I suspect may be a larger phenomenon: local governments’ use of Chinese investment projects to improve their own effective sovereignty – in this case, to help anchor various communities in place along what I will describe as a sort of internal frontier.[9] This was certainly linked to China’s economic expansion into Laos, and it certainly seemed poised to provide what economic geographers call a spatial fix for China’s land problem.[10] But to gloss it as an expansion of Chinese sovereignty is to miss the point entirely.
––––––––
Ban Deng sits out at the end of a well-worn, but fairly recently-built dirt road, about an hour’s motorbike ride from the center of Vieng Phou Kha district (Fig. 2). It is a new village, at least in one sense. Ban Deng was established in 2003 by Khmu migrants from the neighboring district of Na Le, who had been enticed to make the move by their former district governor – a man who, rumor had it, had been rotated to the governorship of Vieng Phou Kha in order to bring “people like them” into the district. One development worker described Ban Deng’s residents as what government officials called “the right kind of Khmu”, a reference to both their place of origin – the east bank of the Nam Tha River – and their ethnic sub-group – which was Khmu Rok. According to Goudineau et al., the Khmu Rok were “a special case” because, in contrast to other Khmu sub-groups in the area, they had become “politically integrated” quite rapidly after 1975 and had received preferential access to development – including land – as a result.[11] Ban Deng, in other words, reflected the geographic legacy of Indochina Wars[12] and was the result of a provincially-coordinated effort to bring the communist heartland of eastern Na Le to the western frontier of Vieng Phou Kha.
Fig. 2 Ban Deng and surroundings
In another sense, however, Ban Deng was much older. As American military maps confirm (Fig. 3), the village site that became Ban Deng was formerly known as LS 357, a remote mountain airstrip established sometime between 1962 and 1973 by the CIA as part of its clandestine war efforts in northwestern Laos.[13] Sitting in the hills to the west of what old French maps call the Yao Mountains, Ban Deng’s location was sat in a part of the district that was formerly home to the Iu Mien (“Yao”) people and had in the 1990s been classified – as if to anticipate Ban Deng’s establishment – as “a priority development zone for the district.”[14]
Fig. 3. Ban Deng, then and now. This map shows Ban Deng’s current village territory overlaid on top of an American military map of the area.[15] The yellow point above LS 357 is my GPS point from Ban Deng. LS 118A is the old CIA base at Nam Nyu.
A 2005 district government report noted that Ban Deng was established due to a shortage of productive land at the migrants’ old village site in Na Le. Ban Deng, in contrast, seemed almost endless. Not only was it on the edge of the district, and the area to the west sparsely (if at all) populated; its official zoning map measured the village territory at 9,304 hectares, the largest in Vieng Phou Kha district by far. This spilled over into villagers’ attitude toward land use. The report mentioned above noted – after reporting on a range of development parameters – a single “challenge”: “some of the villagers did not yet understand the Land and Forest Allocation exercise” that had been conducted in 2004-05, roughly a year after Ban Deng was established. When I visited, this lack of “understanding” seemed to have been practically formalized; the village’s official zoning map, created during the aforementioned Land and Forest Allocation exercise, had been recently covered up with posters. Instead of instructing Ban Deng’s residents about where they were and were not allowed to farm, it was now reminding parents to keep their children vaccinated (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Ban Deng zoning map, late 2007
Ban Deng’s residents, it seemed, were being given relatively free rein on how to make use of their village territory, and in particular where to plant their crops. A pair of soldiers based in the village had recently planted a few hundred rubber seedlings, for example. An ex-government employee who also lived in the village lamented the unruliness of his compatriots, but told me that controlling their farming practices was not a high priority – at least not by coercive means. In fact, cultivation in Ban Deng had an expansionary feel to it. On top of the soldiers’ experiment, villagers had recently had their first meeting with the local Chinese rubber project, an import-export firm that had been approved to “promote” contract farming in the district. As they waited for company representatives to return, they were mulling over the pros and cons of independent smallholder production versus contract farming. Rubber was coming to Ban Deng. But the degree to which “the Chinese” were coming along with it was another question entirely.
––––––––
On the way to Ban Deng from the district center, I had passed through three other villages that had a very different relationship with the rubber company. Unlike the residents of Ban Deng, they had not been offered much of a choice about whether or not to contract with the project, and the nature of their contracting arrangement was different as well. In contrast to the latex-sharing model that other villages in the district were being offered, these three had been selected by the district governor as “tree-sharing” villages. Village land had thus been treated collectively by the project, and villagers hired to plant rubber seedlings on a vast expanse of land (Fig. 5), thirty percent of which would eventually be given back to them when the trees matured. The company would retain ownership of the trees on the other seventy percent. This landscape – a company plantation in the short term, a mixed “core-outgrower” landscape of company- and contractor-owned trees in the longer term – lined either side of the road to Ban Deng. Over the two years prior to my visit, this area had gone from a swidden landscape to the heart of Vieng Phou Kha’s rubber zone.
Fig. 5. Rubber plantation on the road to Ban Deng
A district government representative explained to me that this arrangement had been crafted by the district governor, presumably the same person who had recruited Ban Deng’s residents. He told me that these three villages were the poorest of the poor,[16] and explained their exceptional status in ethnic terms. They were comprised of Lahu (he used the derogatory term Kouy) people who, in local officials’ estimation, were too poor to be contract farmers because they could not afford the long wait between planting and harvesting.[17] Instead, they worked as day laborers – ha sao, kin kham or “work by morning, eat by night” in the local idiom – doing planting and clearing for the rubber company, and cultivating swidden fields further out in the bush (Fig. 6). The rubber plantation work, he explained, and the tree ownership that would follow it were designed to provide permanent livelihoods for the three Kouy villages; with this arrangement, the district administration was attempting to counteract the ethnic group’s proclivity for abandoning the government-established villages along the road and “going off into the forest” to live among their swidden fields.
Fig. 6. Swidden fields on the edge of the company rubber plantation. Arrows point to traditional Lahu rice stacks.
This “off in the forest” was not just a geographic abstraction; it was the frontier where Ban Deng was, and beyond (see Fig. 3, which includes a “Khas Khouis” settlement just west of the current territory of Ban Deng). Through a mix of sources, I came to learn that the area being settled by Ban Deng – as well as by a second, also very large, village just to the south – had been formerly occupied by not just the “Yao” people, but by the Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group made famous via their Cold War ties to the CIA.[18] This earlier discourse of collaboration with the enemy[19] had been replaced by a one of more general ungovernability. Although I did not dig too deeply due to political circumstances explained below, there was an uneasiness to the way local officials dealt with Lahu (re)settlement. Getting them to “settle down” and stop growing opium (a standard goal of minority policy discourse in Laos) was only part of it. Placement and size were essential as well. The three villages on the road to Ban Deng were relatively close to the district center and were lined up along the road, as if for easy observation (Fig. 7). It seemed an odd coincidence that the Lahu were involved in one of the more alarming rubber projects in the province – a large Chinese concession that spilled from military land onto the adjacent land of a Lahu village.[20] Just south of Ban Deng, a Lahu settlement had also been broken up and prevented from reassembling itself because, as one consultant cryptically put it, “the government said they would not accept a large ‘new’ Lahu village.”[21]
Fig. 7. A map in the provincial government museum projects a desire to have Lahu villages (green dots) lined up regularly along the road just north of the district center.
This uneasiness spilled over into urban affairs as well. During my tenure in Luang Namtha, northwestern Laos underwent an anti-American and anti-Christian crackdown that led to at least two Lao disappearances and, according to a recent accounting, the departure of roughly 26 foreigners.[22] Although I was mostly untouched by this, my research activities were curtailed at least once because of my identity as an American, and I was warned – jokingly, but with a hint of seriousness as well – that I might want to identify myself as being a different nationality.
———-
Sovereignty – politics with a capital P – does in fact loom large in the rubber fields of Laos’s northwestern interior, and it does so in ambiguous and multivalent ways. It was beyond my capacity to adequately chart the relationship between the ethnic geography of the upland frontier and the politicization of national and religious identity that was going on in the provincial capital. But the development and deployment of Chinese rubber projects by local officials seemed to span both of these. Where was the line between the “real” threat (to the government? to profitable investment?) and the instrumental use of the past to achieve economic ends? It was difficult to say. What was clear, however, was that the territorial dimensions of Chinese agribusiness, and the questions of sovereignty that accompanied them, were less national in scale than they were provincial, in both senses of the term. The frontier in question was not an unregulated expansion of China into Laos; as the case of Ban Deng shows, the transformation was quite carefully orchestrated, and the identities involved were locally rather than nationally referenced. Chinese investment certainly was playing its part, offering a way to anchor the villages of western Vieng Phou Kha into their appointed places. But the overall logic – from the placement of the villages to the contracting model assigned to each – was the product of a sovereign power that far more local, and far more Lao. While Chinese extraterritoriality may help explain the special economic zones along the border, it does not appear to be the main story in Laos’s upland interior. At least not yet.
Mike Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and conducted fieldwork in Laos during 2006-08. His research was supported by the Social Science Research Council (with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the National Science Foundation, and the University of California. He is currently writing his dissertation.
[1] See earlier NM posts by Antonella Diana, Olivier Evrard, Andrew Walker and myself.
[2] Chinese foreign ministry issues warning against gambling in Laos, 26 Mar. 2010; Chinese casino on the Mekong: fears development front for money laundering, Asia News.it, 29 Jan. 2011.
[3] Chris Lyttleton & Pál Nyíri, Dams, Casinos and Concessions: Chinese Megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia, no date;
[4] Ibid., p. 8.
[5] Pál Nyíri, “Extraterritoriality. Foreign Concessions: the Past and Future of a Form of Shared Sovereignty”, inaugural oration at Amsterdam’s Free University, Nov. 19, 2009; the Cambodia example comes from Lyttleton & Nyíri, above.
[6] Shawn W. Crispin, “The limits of Chinese expansionism”, Asia Times Online, December 23, 2010.
[7] ibid.
[8] See various NM posts on resettlement in Laos by Holly High, Ian Baird and Bruce Shoemaker and Nicholas Farrelly.
[9] The notion of “anchoring” figures centrally in the earlier resettlement debate. See previous footnote.
[10] David Harvey (The Limits to Capital, 1982, and The New Imperialism, 2003). Also see Kathy Le Mons Walker, 2008. From covert to overt: Everyday peasant politics in China and the implications for transnational agrarian movements. Journal of Agrarian Change 8:462-488.
[11] Yves Goudineau et al., 1997, Resettlement and social characteristics of new villages, UNESCO & UNDP, vol. 2: 26. In contrast, thousands of Khmu from the right (west) bank of the Nam Tha had been involuntarily resettled from Na Le to Vieng Phou Kha between 1975 and 1996.
[12] “The modern district of Na Le was the scene of quite violent encounters between the troops of the Lao Issala on the left [east] bank and the counter-revolutionary guerillas on the right [west] bank. The Nam Tha [River] was a true front line…” (Goudineau et al., 23).
[13] On the secret war in northwestern Laos, see Roger Warner, 1996, Shooting at the Moon and Alfred McCoy, 2003, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
[14] Goudineau et al., 23. On the flight and resettlement of the Iu Mien, see Goudineau et al. and Leif Jonsson, 2009, War’s ontogeny: Militias and ethnic boundaries in Laos and exile. Southeast Asian Studies 47:125-149. The “Yao mountains” are now comprised largely of the Nam Ha National Protected Area.
[15] U.S. Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, Washington DC, compiled 1975; map series 1501, edition 3, 1:250,000 scale, sheet NF 47-16 (“Luang-Namtha, Laos; Thailand; Burma”).
[16] Vieng Phou Kha is officially ranked as one of Laos’s “priority poverty” districts.
[17] Variations on this theme appear throughout Luang Namtha, and seem to be a chief rationalization behind the proliferation of tree-sharing arrangements that bear striking resemblance (although potentially important differences as well) to the lease-based concessions that the northern provinces had agreed to avoid in late 2005 (Weiyi Shi, 2008, Rubber boom in Luang Namtha: A transnational perspective. GTZ, Vientiane; Simone Vongkhamhor et al., 2007, Key issues in smallholder rubber planting in Oudomxai and Luang Prabang provinces, Lao PDR. National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute, Upland Research Development Program, Vientiane).
[18] Gordon Young, 1967, Tracks of an Intruder; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin.
[19] Ian Baird reports an anecdote from 2002 in which a Lahu village about 40 km west of Ban Deng (in the Nam Nyu Special Zone) “disappeared” into the forest and was resettled by the army amidst rumors that “the Americans are back” (In D. Vinding et al., eds. The Indigenous World 2004. International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen).
[20] Shi, Rubber boom in Luang Namtha, 32-33.
[21] Anonymous. This was a scoping report for a development project that ultimately did not happen.
[22] William Tuffin, 3 Jan. 2011.
This is so scarily like southern Lao, where Vietnam is the big player, rather than China directly (although Chinese money is important). There westerners who exercise some autonomy (i.e not just there as part of the formal aid industry) have been chased out, sometimes with deaththreats. And it is not a simple take-over, but a deliberate restructuring and development that provincial and local authiorities are deeply embedded in. This includes a kind of political and ethnic integration (e.g. the “election” of a Vietnamese Mayor in Paksong) that seems on the one hand quite cosmopolitan and on the other downright sinister.
I don’t have any delusions about keeping Lao for the Lao – the Lao Loun were never more than an ethnic minority on the East bank of the Mekong, and any state in that region will always be deeply mixed demographically. Present developments merely serve to show how deluded Lao nationalists are – living in a fanatsy world in which there is a “Lao” state and a “Lao” people – news flash: 80% of Laos are subjects of the Thai king. There should be open discussion about the likely outcomes of current trends, for the good of all affected by them.
Quality comment or not?
3 
3
I find the overall tone in these China-Lao articles so negative (politically negative?) and this article is a welcome exception. Looking at the bigger macro-economic picture one can say that the industrialisation of the Chinese west coast has lifted hundreds of million of Chinese out of poverty. Now it’s Sout-East China’s turn to become industrialized, and Lao P.D.R.’s north-east can play a part in this as a supplier of land. Instead of pointing at the Chinese wirtschafswunder and emphasizing the positive effects that the linking in of NE Lao into the SE-Chinese industrial infrastructure can have and already has, it seems like some western commentators have developed a fetish for the negative effects of China’s policy, to only mention the positive developmental effects it could have on the region as a byline. The world wants cheap tires and cars, Yunnan has the factories, Laos could help supply the rubber. Easy like that.
Very interesting article by the way, and great pictures. I particularly like that one with the vaccination posters over the land zoning map.
Quality comment or not?
4 
3
Sorry Paul #1, the days of the British Empire is over…. You can’t go to some Asian Land or African land, plant a flag and claim it for the Queen!
Welcome to the 21st century…… Economic development is good for the poor. Undeveloped assets are worth nothing – zero.
Quality comment or not?
1 
9
Neptunian,
Making simplistic claims that “economic development is good for the poor” really isn’t very useful. Some types of development may be good for the poor, some of the time, but if you really think that everything that is called “development” is “good for the poor” you must be really naive, as there is plenty of evidence that demonstrates that this simply isn’t true. When it comes to development, there are usually winners and losers. Things are almost always complex. I would recommend that you take a more realistic and nuanced position. Otherwise, you won’t come across as being informed or credible.
Quality comment or not?
6 
1
I’ve just returned from a visit to a Lahu village in northern Thailand. Ban Pong Hai is a valley away from the main Lahu millage Mai Ai and about 45 minutes outside of Fang (a 3 hour drive from Chiangmai). The development of rubber plantations there is driven by a Bangkok developer who married into the Lahu community. The people that I spoke to have a hard time developing their land as they would like for lack of capital. Lychee and orange plantations predominate but many of the locals would like to develop rubber. It was interesting to see the scale of the irrigation projects that accompanied these orchards. Many of them had been put into place in conjunction with the provincial university out of Chiangmai.
These Lahu are now tied quite firmly to the land and their villages will not be moving now that they have seriously vested interests in the area. Nor are they as interested in cultivating opium. 10 years ago they lost almost 20% of their population to aids as a result of heroin addiction. This, in combination with the development of schools, roads, and crops, has brought them into a much closer orbit with the local economy and society and a major disinterest in opium production.
Quality comment or not?
3 
1
M.D.,
I would just point out that the article opens by asking the question,
"Is northern Laos turning into Chinese territory?"–and while your conclusion does not refer back to it, your answer is, in effect, a resounding"No".I agree with you, and I find that most English-language writing on the subject is predicated upon a none-too-subtle Sino-phobia.
For anyone sincerely concerned with the dysphoria of development projects in Northern Laos, the Chinese should not be compared to an ideal, but instead should be contrasted to the grim reality of (e.g.) French and German development agencies –and, moreover, the Chinese should be contrasted to purely for-profit undertakings from other quarters (e.g., the South Koreans planting eucalyptus in Laos have no pretense of being a humanitarian charity!)
I have spoken directly to the Germans (DED/GTZ) promoting rubber plantations in Northern Laos, and I assume that the proceedings of the international conference they held to promote this industry in Vientiane (i.e., inviting speakers from Malaysia and other developed rubber economies) are available on paper somewhere; it is astounding to me that the industrialization of the landscape, and hastening of Lao deforestation, is a cause that the German taxpayer supports, but this seems to be the case. A spectacular failure of French “agricultural intervention” in Northern Laos is documented in a chapter of Bourdier’s book, finally in print, Development and Dominion, and is instructive as to the broader attitudes of AFD, etc., toward everything from road-building to rubber-planting.
E.M.
Quality comment or not?
4 
1
I’d like to back Paul up re: southern Laos.
I recently finished a stint with a major NGO down there, to watch the Vietnamese logging companies roll out of the protected forests with seemingly endless convoys of “recently legal” cut timber (to be replaced by endless rubber plantations) was heartbreaking.
We were in a bit of a race to develop a planning framework to get some legal recognition for the villagers land rights before it was all snatched up, but with the government complicit in the dodgy harvest it did absolutely no good.
With all the villagers being forced off their land, their livelihoods stripped away along with their forests, and their later being given the “opportunity” to serve as cheap labour for the owners of the newly commodified land, it’s the Industrial Revolution all over again.
For every $1 an NGO throws at the Laos government to protect a forest or preserve a village, unsustainable FDI is throwing $10 at them, and the bigwigs were cashing in fast. And by fast, I mean I saw Porsche’s in one of the poorest provinces in the country.
Surely there has to be a better way.
Quality comment or not?
5 
0
Mike,
Thank you for such a thoughtful and interesting piece concerning the issue of extraterritoriality in northern Laos. One of the important contributions that you have made is to problematize the notion of extraterritoriality. In contrast to EM’s comment, I don’t find you to be arguing that there is no issue of Lao sovereignty in relation to the spread of Chinese rubber growing contracts. I think the point you are trying to make is that extraterritoriality is a complex issue and in certain circumstances, what might appear to be the Lao government’s loss of sovereignty is actually part of a strategy to secure control over particular territories by creating a permanently settled agricultural population.
What is clear from this essay is that governments attempt to use foreign capital in complex ways to achieve a variety of different goals that do not play out into simple understandings of sovereignty and extraterritoriality. However, it is important to realize that these strategies and tactics may be succeeding in some ways and failing in others. While a landscape dominated by contracted rubber farms hardly characterizes a case of neo-imperialism, when combined with the casino SEZs, the recently completed transnational highway, and the future railroad, along with a host of other Chinese investments in resources throughout the country, there is clearly reason to fear a heavy Chinese dominance in the future with a significant neo-colonial aura.
In regard to the South, I am going to have to disagree somewhat with Paul and Justin’s comments. The imposition of Vietnamese capital certainly poses a threat to Lao territoriality in the South, but it is important not to overstate their position. The ability of Vietnamese corporations to rent large tracts of land, illegally log the forests, and set up a host of other investments does not necessarily mean that southern Laos is becoming incorporated as a province of Vietnam. It is important to keep in mind the authoritarian nature of the Lao state and the degree of control which the government is able to exercise over its land. Investors can rent but not purchase land and the Lao government remains the ultimate owner of all land within the country.
In the end, perhaps our concerns should be less with the imperialistic nature of Laos’ neighbors and more with the way in which investments from those countries are structuring the social relations of land-based resource production. As Justin aptly argues, millions of dollars are flowing into country’s land, displacing peasants and turning them into semi-proletariat wage labor on the plantations as the investors are making huge profits off the land that was swept from beneath their feet. Essentially, Laos is quickly turning into a country composed of a rent-seeking governmental elite, a rural proletariat, and a foreign capital-owning class. If the vast resources of Laos are to be developed in any sort of equitable way, this is certainly not it.
Miles
Quality comment or not?
6 
0
Thanks everyone for taking the time to not just read, but to write in your two cents. Without trying to respond to all of the points that have been brought up (most need no follow-up from me), I want to jump back in on a few things.
Eisel is quite right to point out that my answer to the opening question (Is northern Laos turning into Chinese territory?) is, effectively, a resounding no. At least he’s right in one sense – that is my effective answer – but by leaving it *actually* unanswered I also was trying to say, as Miles picked up on, that it’s not that great a question. On the one hand, I think Nyiri and Lyttleton are really onto something in pointing out the uncomfortable mix of foreign humiliation and modernization that coalesces in certain spaces of transnational development, be they Chinese or otherwise. The “demonstration gardens” of northern Laos, for instance, have some stories to offer up for sure.
On the other hand, I think it’s worth the reminder that extraterritoriality is a nineteenth century Western legal term first and foremost, and this effectively puts the question to us of how we want to use it as an analytic concept for the global landscape of today. The territoriality it presumes is of a particular and familiar sort – that of the Westphalian nation state – and is hardly the more flexible notion of territory (as political or state space) that we might want in order to deal with the extra-national and extra-legal dimensions of something like transnational state-backed agribusiness.
Anyway, I’m glad what I wrote could be read one way by Eisel and another by Miles. I guess my main goal was to take a different line from none-too-subtle Sino-phobia that Eisel mentioned, and to try and show that one need not be able to nail down the culprit (a nation, a government, a firm, a tribe, what have you) to be alarmed by what materializes when all of these things come together concretely. Eisel’s last point is in some ways the most challenging, asking in so many words what, if anything, follows my concern. Chinese (and Vietnamese) investment is hyper-visible partly due to its scale and its preference for resource projects (and Justin’s 10-to-1 ratio may be an underestimate). But it’s also the result of a concerted research effort by, among others, “the Germans”. This isn’t a criticism – GTZ has done what many other NGOs have not and made its research available to the public (including circulating it in Lao) – but it does highlight the need to shine the light of critique around a bit more evenly. At least “the Chinese” are putting their money where their mouth is. In this day and age (and I don’t just mean post-2008), that’s saying quite a bit.
Quality comment or not?
3 
0
A very good and comprehensive look at the current image of a form of extra-territoriality in the north of Laos. I note that some comments emphasise the negative aspects of China/Chinese in Laos — not just in the north. Having completed my own doctoral research in Laos and N.Thailand in 1975 (also funded by the Social Science Research Council — but UK not US), there is some deja vu — but importantly the players have changed. I still live in Laos (indeed in Heng Boun Road — the ‘Chinatown’ of Vientiane), and the increased presence of Chinese from China (rather than Chinese from Laos or Thailand) is notable — for one thing, very few speak Lao. But Chinese-Chinese are no more pushy or dominating or expropriating than other peoples e.g. the South Koreans. And taking a long view, I would say the Chinese casinos and the drugs, prostitution etc that seem to be attached to nightlife, are certainly no worse than the pre-1975 debauchery under the American influence. I can understand Lao being a bit worried, but those unwanted aspects of foreign aid and development of the past (Mme Lulu’s, The Purple Porpoise, etc) disappeared surprisingly quickly once the US-military presence was removed or fled. What did not disappear was the problem created by nine years of senseless bombing, which 44 years after the last bomb was dropped continues to make an area of Laos the size of Florida risky to farm — yet another form of extra-territoriality. If the Lao cede part of their territory to China in any form, that is repeating a pattern well-established historically. Whether China, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia or Thailand, the pattern is much the same. But at least there are now no armies or constant aerial bombardments. The morally unwanted legacies of extra-territoriality in all its forms can disappear fast. All in all, the game is the same, but today some Lao at least gain something rather than being forced off their land or blown to bits. All things being comparative…ni hao ma?
Quality comment or not?
10 
0
‘The Chinese are not interested in South-East Asian towns until they have reached on their [own] initiative a certain level of population and prosperity.
They then descend like a flock of gregarious birds, galvanizing its life with their own crow-like vitality.
The feeble shoots of local culture wither away and what remains is a degenerative native slum round the hard, bright self-contained Chinese core.’
A Dragon Apparent (1951)
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
Quality comment or not?
4 
2
Can’t disagree with Norman Lewis! But can’t help thinking that many Singaporeans and Malaysians might qualify him. And where would places like London be without Soho or its equivalent? I do not feel the Chinese need or want any defence from me, an Englishman, but it would be interesting to get some Chinese and overseas Chinese views on the longer-term effects of ‘crow-like’ vitality. Certainly it qualified ‘may pen rai’ in Thailand. Looking at the SEA region as a whole, the benefits might be seen as outweighing any cultural differences — and let’s remember that cultural effects work in two directions.
Quality comment or not?
3 
0
Norman Lewis, just another “englishman” yearning for glories long gone… sad.
Quality comment or not?
1 
4
The Chinese are better than|no worse than the French|Americans|Germans is of little interest to anyone but the apologists of present|past imperialism.
This is like the Israeli argument concerning their treatment of the Palestinians vs, say, the US treatment of the ‘native North Americans’.
The imperialists are all no damn good. Lessor|greater degrees of no-goodness make little difference long term to the Lao.
Quality comment or not?
2 
0
I have read the original article a number of times now and fail to see how, ultimately, the author can claim to have weakened the argument that Chinese extra-territoriality in Laos – in one form or another – is fast becoming a grim reality.
Whilst his account of a canny provincial manipulation of the Chinese rubber companies’ land-grabbing ambitions ( in the service of enhancing politburo policy of the corralling and quasi-internment of ethnic minority tribes of questionable loyalty) is interesting in a tangential sense – it remains just that.
That the rubber barons are there in the first place and – intentionally or incidentally – are the incipient vanguard of
Chinese economic imperialism is more to to the point.
What the article does serve to highlight, however, is how readily a formerly self-sufficient agrarian society is allowing itself to be transformed into an economically dependent and consumerist one with a consequent cultural and spiritual degradation.
To claim that – in the trade off – there will be future developmental and societal benefits to the Lao people from this injection of Chinese capital seems – prima facie – hard to argue against. But if these benefits can only be achieved by turning Laos into a client state then its national sovereignty, in one way or another, will ultimately be compromised.
I don’t see how the effective annexation of north-west Laos can seriously be denied given the accelerating expansion and development of the Boten-Houei Sai corridor or, more to the point, the commencement of the Boten-Vientiane high-speed rail link.
Anyone who views the promotional video for the latter cannot be left in any doubt that in its scope and implications it is wholly and simply a grand design that will transform Laos forever.
In computer simulation, as we see the track rapidly and effortlessly unroll itself across numerous bridges and through lengthy mountain tunnels, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer monumental ambition and technical wizardry of the project.
However, beyond the flim flam, we should have cause to question not only the underlying motives which inform its construction but also the present and future consequences.
Will the rail link serve local interests? On the contrary, as several commentators have already pointed out, this link and others to Burma, Vietnam and Thailand will only – in the main – further China’s own economic and strategic interests and any crumbs that fall to the nations they traverse will be incidental at best. And, it must be noted, these countries will be seriously and chronically in hock to Chinese bankers for their proportionate share in funding these massive projects.
What the promotional video also doesn’t show is that the Boten-Vientiane rail link will have huge environmental and ecological consequences both during the construction phase and ongoing. Furthermore, foreign interests will lease/buy rural property adjacent to its path as well as in the numerous towns where the stations are to be built. Chinese workers and technicians will stay on to maintain and run the system. Their families will migrate along with them. The Lao will become increasingly proletarianised to service the new infrastructures. However, as in the West, they will have the sop of an increased ability to purchase mostly unnecessary consumer products to convince themselves that they are actually middle class instead.
Rather than moving from a landlocked country towards being a landlinked country, Laos will merely become a road to somewhere else. And, as its people watch the cargo trains whiz past them interspersed with the luxury passenger trains in which they will not be able to afford to travel, they may eventually – in virtue of improved educational standards – be able to seriously reflect on the notion of progress itself.
Quality comment or not?
3 
0
Re: neptunian, you seriously mischaracterized my point, I am delighted with development, but it should be transparent, and the benefits should be accessible to the residents. The best way to ensure transparency is to allow international visitors to observe and report; chasing them out of town is not an exercise in post-colonial sovereignty, it is a signal, time to draw the blinds before you beat your wife.
Quality comment or not?
1 
0
To Norman Lewis. I agree that far too much has been made of the distinction between land-locked and land-linked. Laos could well become the road to somewhere else, with Lao simply sitting and picking up the toll-transit charges. But, on the other hand, Laos could become a much more integrated part of ASEAN, with benefits all round. Far from fearing the effect of rail and road links across Laos, these should perhaps be welcomed as a century or two overdue. Had Laos been colonised by the Brits, there might already be a rail network long in place — but it would have been built by migrant Chinese workers for sure. I think what we are witnessing in Laos is simply a rather rapid and long overdue catching-up with what surrounding countries have long had. When Laos is on an equal infrastructural footing with its neighbours, and when ASEAN and ASEAN++ is more developed economically and politically, it should benefit all participants. But, of course, there will always be dominant countries in any bloc. That’s the way of the world. Expand and join or wither and die (or both?).
Quality comment or not?
3 
0
A thought provoking read, thanks.
I would like to see a similar analysis of Chinese and Thai investment in / ownership of Laos’ water resources.
Quality comment or not?
1 
0