This chapter presents the book’s second case study: Chinese efforts to manage ‘non-traditional’ security issues in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It focuses on the challenges of illegal narcotics and associated criminal activity, particularly banditry on the Mekong river, to which China has become more exposed through its ‘reform and opening up’. Contrary to widespread assumptions that ‘Westphalian’ China is leery of undermining sovereignty, we show that Chinese agencies have actually moved to tackle these problems at source by sponsoring opium-substitution programmes and transboundary law-enforcement projects in Laos and Myanmar. The outcomes of these interventions depend on how Chinese party-state transformation dynamics interact with socio-political conflicts in these target states. On the Chinese side, opium-substitution has been hijacked by local cadre-capitalists in Yunnan province, skewing implementation towards their sectional interests. This has intersected with predatory social relations in Myanmar and Laos to undermine drug-suppression efforts. Conversely, Chinese central government agencies have had greater success in corralling neighbouring counterparts into a transnational policing network, recently cemented into a new international organisation, the Lancang-Mekong Law Enforcement and Security Centre.

The concluding chapter draws out the implications of our findings for scholars and policymakers. First, it identifies key patterns in our findings and proposes hypotheses for further research. Inductively, it suggests that the degree of Chinese policy coherence reflects whether coordinating mechanisms are deployed and effective, and whether powerful domestic interests align. It argues that our conceptualisation of the Chinese party-state does not necessarily mean that Chinese behaviour is unproblematic – but that it may emerge for reasons not anticipated by traditional models. And it emphasises the crucial importance of partner/recipient countries in shaping the outcomes of Chinese overseas engagements. Secondly, the chapter draws out recommendations for policymakers in China and elsewhere. We argue that responding to China’s rise as though it was a strategically guided monolith is clearly mistaken, requiring a more nuanced and sophisticated approach. We also urge Chinese policymakers to be more open about the limitations of Chinese governance and to attempt more decisive state reforms. In a final postscript, we offer some thoughts about what light the state transformation framework can shed on the COVID-19 pandemic.

This chapter elaborates the theoretical and methodological approach used in this book. Guided by Gramscian state theory, we trace the post-1978 rise of a powerful, though divided, cadre-capitalist class, and the associated, uneven and contested fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of China’s party-state. We then elaborate a theoretical model capable of explaining how policymaking and implementation work under these changed conditions: the Chinese-style regulatory state. In this model, rather than making detailed, binding decisions and strategies, top leaders try to loosely steer and coordinate a plethora of actors towards favoured ends. But other actors can influence, interpret and even ignore these policy frameworks. Chinese behaviours thus represent an ongoing struggle within the fractured party-state. Outcomes are further shaped by socio-political dynamics within the other countries in which Chinese actors operate. The chapter also explains our method and case selection, and canvasses and rejects some predictable objections to our argument: that China’s state transformation is nothing new, and that recentralisation under Xi Jinping has made the state transformation argument outdated.

Matsu in early times was not an immigrant society but rather a stopover or temporary place to live, with people coming and going in a constant state of flux. Lying beyond the reaches of state power, the islands were almost deserted, becoming a lawless place where “the strongest fist took everything.” The island society during this period was characterized by transience and brokenness. The history of Matsu in this period is reviewed.

During the army’s warzone administration of Matsu, the fishing economy of the islands faced severe challenges. Taiwan started the process of industrialization in the 1970s and required a larger labor force, and many Matsu locals moved there—mostly to Taoyuan—to work in factories. Those who stayed behind on the islands shifted their forms of livelihood toward offering goods and services to the military.

Although many of the individual imaginations discussed in previous chapters have not developed into social imaginaries, the imagining subjects do not easily fade away; they remain latent and may garner renewed power at unexpected moments.