At the crossroads of the ‘Kunming–Bangkok Highway’ (R3 highway in Laos) and ‘Kunming–Vientiane Railway’, or ‘China–Laos Railway’ (opened in December 2021), the northern Lao border province of Luang Namtha is developing into a regional hub linking China with Thailand, directly contributing to Laos’ national vision of moving from a land-locked towards a land-linked country. Dr Phimmasone Leuangkhamma, then-governor of Luang Namtha province, outlines the vision for his province as follows:
Luang Namtha Province (LNT) [is] located in [a] strategic location and bordered [sic] with China (157 km) and Myanmar (130 km). The road R3 connects China and Thailand via Borkeo [sic] and Luang Namtha Provinces. We can say that LNT is [a] strategic connecting point to three nearby countries that are big markets for LNT goods. This strategic location will turn LNT to become [a] logistics hub and center of trans-border transportation of goods and services in [the] near future.Footnote 1
Dr Phimmasone articulated this vision in 2013, the year in which President Xi Jinping proclaimed China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Therein, Laos figures as a central Southeast Asian node as part of the China–Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor. Upon his visit to Laos in November 2017, Xi Jinping wrote in an open letter, published in English and Lao in Laotian mainstream media, that ‘there is a high degree of complementarity between China's Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] and the strategy of Laos to transform itself from a landlocked to a land-linked country’.Footnote 2 He further described the ‘China–Laos Railway’, the flagship of the BRI in Laos, as ‘[t]he transportation artillery that will drive the development of Laos [and that] is a dream coming true.’Footnote 3 Also in 2017, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the architect of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Corridors, similarly paints a rosy future of Laos’ land-linkedness, constituting ‘a major trade thoroughfare both within the Mekong region and the wider Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) community’.Footnote 4 Clearly, Laos, and northern Laos for that matter, has been the target of overlapping external large-scale top-down mappings and visions, and subsequent domestic translations, of neoliberal development and regional connectedness (see maps 1 and 2).
Map 1. Land-linked Laos as a regional hub
Map 2. Luang Namtha province
Largely missing in all these representational accounts of landlocked yet land-linked Laos are local voices from the ground. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on Lao small-scale traders moving across the borderlands of Yunnan, Laos and Thailand,Footnote 5 this article examines how Chinese promises and ‘dreams’ of infrastructural development—in its concrete materiality as well as rhetorical and symbolic spectacle—intersect with local ‘dreams’, experiences, aspirations, fears and practices on the ground in Luang Namtha. I deliberately build on Xi Jinping's frequently used language of ‘dream’ (zhongguo meng, ‘Chinese dream’, and yatai meng, ‘Asia-Pacific dream’). However, I should not be misunderstood as simply adopting, subscribing to, or naturalising China's governmental rhetoric of the ‘Chinese dream’. I rather use the notion of ‘dream’ to initiate an ethnography that is attentive to the affective dimension of local everyday engagements with a growing Chinese economic and infrastructural presence. At the same time, more than an initial analytical lens, my usage of ‘dream’ also reflects an empirical reality as most of my interlocutors were already quite familiar with the idea of a ‘Chinese dream’. With the multifarious notion of ‘dream’ as the starting point, careful ethnographic attention to the diversity of quotidian accounts of and concrete engagements with neighbouring China reveals a wide and intricate spectrum of inspiration, admiration, aspiration, pragmatic choices, disillusion, envy, resentment and contempt. These ambivalent and seemingly contradictory repertoires of both positive and negative emotions and perceptions of both opportunities and perils of Chinese development often revolve indeed around infrastructure.
However, instead of starting off with highly visible and spectacular BRI-related infrastructure projects and exceptional development zones, this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in Luang Namtha and foregrounds their often invisible yet central role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of those infrastructural visions of land-linked connectivity. Their mobile and flexible ‘infrastructural practices’ are grounded in, and actively shape, vernacular ‘infrastructure spaces’ in the form of vibrant local marketplaces, where local material, discursive, social, economic and political engagements with, and co-productions of, China-induced or -oriented infrastructures play out most visibly. Against this backdrop of their materially infrastructured and socially infrastructuring borderland livelihoods and lives, I attend in the following to Luang Namtha's marketplaces (themselves already mostly Chinese material infrastructures) to flesh out local dynamics of actually living and producing current and expecting future Chinese social and material infrastructures. Therein, the recently opened ‘China–Laos Railway’, to which I will also inevitably turn attention, is only the most recent, yet most visible and spectacular, instance. Before turning to these both mundane and exceptional venues of local engagements with Chinese infrastructures, I will critically reflect on the inescapable expectation to write first and foremost on China's assertive infrastructure push under the BRI label when studying current developments in (northern) Laos. I will in a next step delineate how my ethnographic work on small-scale traders, and associated discourses and practices of ‘smallness’, completes and complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small, helpless and passive victim.
Laos’ land-linked history under the shadow of BRI
China's current ambitions and eventual realisation of (Sino–) Southeast Asian infrastructural connectivity is only the most recent momentum of Laos’ longer history of appropriating and engaging politically and economically larger (precolonial, colonial, national) powers, acting in what C. Patterson Giersch describes in his Qing history of the Yunnan–Southeast Asian frontier as a ‘middle ground’ of ‘fluid cultural and economic exchange where acculturation and the creation of hybrid political institutions were contingent on local conditions.Footnote 6
Zooming in on Luang Namtha province, Olivier Evrard states that it ‘has for centuries been a place for trade and movement to and fro. Numerous mule trails, nowadays simply footpaths, once criss-crossed the province linking Siamese, Burmese and Chinese border posts, together with those of [neighbouring] Oudomxai province’.Footnote 7 Luang Namtha's historically important role along the routes of Yunnanese caravan trade into Southeast Asia, best recorded for the nineteenth century,Footnote 8 but traceable to much earlier histories of Sino-Southeast Asian connectivity,Footnote 9 has been subsequently invoked by policymakers to ‘re-establish and strengthen the longstanding connections between northwestern Laos, northern Thailand and southern China’.Footnote 10
However, despite Luang Namtha's, or Laos’ historical trajectory as a ‘cosmopolitan space of cultural contention’,Footnote 11 it is the relative smallness of Laos, commonly articulated as a weak and passive victim helplessly exposed to its larger political and economic neighbours, which dominates the burgeoning scholarship on China's rising influence in Southeast Asia, and in Laos in particular, triggered by the BRI. Remarkably still employing the stereotyped representation of China as a dangerous dragon,Footnote 12 this scholarship largely focuses on encroaching Chinese investment and infrastructure, for northern Laos most prominently studied for exceptional spaces such as the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and the Mohan–Boten Economic Cooperation Zone at the China–Laos border.Footnote 13 Often conceptualised as Chinese ‘enclaves’,Footnote 14 these zones, emblematic of Chinese modes of development or ‘high modernism’,Footnote 15 prompt concerns of Laos losing, or ‘commodifying’, sovereignty to China,Footnote 16 leading to China's ‘soft extraterritoriality’ in Laos.Footnote 17 Will Doig puts it more drastically in his account of China's regional railway ambitions, arguing that ‘Laos, to varying degrees, has relinquished its national sovereignty in exchange for modernisation, giving China jurisdiction over a substantial amount of its land’.Footnote 18 Here, the history of Laos as a contested, externally created spaceFootnote 19 is brought to the fore, continually serving military, geopolitical and geoconomic strategic interests of larger regional powers ‘through the history of capitalist development, spatial integration and colonial expansion in Southeast Asia’.Footnote 20 Against this background, Sebastian Strangio argues that ‘[d]espite possessing all the accoutrements of modern nationhood, the country has remained weak and vulnerable to outside encroachment, especially along its porous periphery’.Footnote 21 Brian Eyler similarly concludes that ‘even though Laos qualifies in every aspect as a modern nation-state, its interior and periphery remain as contested spaces highly vulnerable to the machinations of both neighboring countries and global powers’.Footnote 22
These external accounts of Laos’ persistent relative smallness—remaining economically and politically small, or even becoming smaller vis-à-vis its larger neighbours because of improved connectivity—are mainly developed under the perceived shadow of the BRI. Consequently, the Third China Made Workshop similarly foregrounded China's BRI to ‘examine how Chinese infrastructures transform the social worlds and natural landscapes that they encounter as they move beyond China into Southeast Asia—often framed as the first segment of the Belt and Road Initiative—and how these infrastructures, are in turn, transformed by that transferal’.Footnote 23 This workshop thus responds to the emerging body of anthropological studies of roads and (cross-border) infrastructureFootnote 24 now increasingly seen as an integral component of China's BRI. Reflecting on the rapidly growing academic landscape of scholarship, institutions and research collaborations largely dedicated to the BRI, Tim Oakes comments that
[t]he Belt & Road was only ever meant to be a vague idea, a notion, a gesture, the beginning of a sentence waiting to be completed by someone else. It was an invitation. And perhaps this is why it has generated such an exuberant response. We all love filling in the blank. The BRI is not a policy. It's not even a ‘soft policy’ (Holbig 2004), that is, a policy written with enough vagueness to accommodate the highly diverse, and often competing, agendas and instruments that will drive its implementation. It's barely even a framework. Instead, it's an aspirational statement of evolutionary principles that invite imaginary cartographies of lines and corridors. Rather than viewing the BRI as a grand scheme formulated by Xi Jinping – a view that continues to dominate most popular media and commentaries from the punditariat – we are on safer ground approaching it as an evolutionary discourse, perhaps even a performance, a kind of ‘development theater.’Footnote 25
Recent calls for more empirically grounded and ethnographically informed studies of the BRI promisingly set out to complicate the picture on the ground, thereby going beyond rather abstract and state-centric International Relations (IR) theorisations of China's BRI infrastructure (mainly spectacular railway) projects as manifestations of structural and discursive power, and corresponding different response strategies of Southeast Asian states.Footnote 26 In this connection, a special issue in Political Geography boldly claims to ‘comprise one of the first collections of theoretically robust and empirically grounded work on the BRI’.Footnote 27 Acknowledging ‘how global initiatives like the BRI are messy, contingent, and uneven in their outcomes, even as Chinese and global elites benefit from presenting it as a unified framework and strategy’,Footnote 28 the editors importantly view ‘the BRI as a process of co-construction, involving not just state and business elites from China, but also local officials, financiers, firm operatives, middlemen, and community members’.Footnote 29 Similarly, in a special issue in Eurasian Geography and Economics, Max D. Woodworth and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthie assert ‘to avoid performing the ideological work of ascribing coherence and purposiveness to the BRI, and instead to focus on the locally specific processes of muddling through and local adaptations to continuously emergent constraints and possibilities, some of them related to the BRI, others having much longer histories’.Footnote 30
However, after all, the resulting scholarship is first and foremost still framed, branded and conceived as addressing issues directly related to and arising from the BRI, thereby also (re-)claiming a certain scholarly justification and significance. One might ask (rather polemically, I admit) whether it only needed something like the appealing notion of the BRI—the ‘invitation’Footnote 31 —to (re-)initiate ethnographic research in respective regional contexts of infrastructure development and change, now ultimately studied as shadows, or as being in the shadow, of the BRIFootnote 32—or, in the case of Southeast Asia, of China at large, be it in the shadow of the dragonFootnote 33 or of Beijing.Footnote 34 Although the official cartography of BRI is highly, and maybe even intentionally, ambiguous and vague, with any officially sanctioned map prominently absent,Footnote 35 current social, economic and political developments in certain target areas, including Southeast Asia, are already scholarly clearly mapped in one way or another in reference to the BRI. Regarding James Scott'sFootnote 36 application of Willem van Schendel'sFootnote 37 ‘Zomia’ to upland Southeast Asia as a region of historically rooted state evasion, Harold Brookfield predicted that ‘[n]o-one will again write about the people of this and other “marginal” regions without reference to these ideas’.Footnote 38 This prediction also seems valid for the ‘vague idea’Footnote 39 of the BRI. Therein, variations of local agency are mostly understood in relation to—in response to or as a result of—, thus overshadowed by, larger geopolitical and -economic dynamics of socio-economic change and spatial transformation as induced by the BRI.
Towards an ethnography of ‘smallness’
I should not be mistaken as dismissing the multitude of rapid changes in the region with disastrous consequences for local livelihoods, especially in regard to environmental degradation and land dispossession due to long-standing, often but not always necessarily Chinese, large-scale projects of natural resource extraction.Footnote 40 Exploring otherwise understudied transnational worlds of cross-border traders in northern Laos, I simply want to point to the possibility of local actors not merely being passively affected by and exposed to change, but actively contributing to, and co-producing, (China-induced) dynamics of a constantly changing borderland economy. I contend that small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos themselves have been continually producing borderland infrastructures, centrally enabling on the ground the actual workings of transnational connectivity or ‘land-linkedness’. Here, AbdouMaliq Simone's conceptualisation of ‘people as infrastructure’, originally applied to urban spaces in Johannesburg, can be applied to borderlands.Footnote 41 Shaped ‘simultaneously by regularity and provisionality’,Footnote 42 the latter are, like cities,
characterized by incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city [in our case, borderland] is to be inhabited and used. These intersections […] have depended on the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices. These conjunctions become an infrastructure—a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city [in our case, borderland].Footnote 43
By paying attention to local practices of socially (co-)producing and sustaining borderland infrastructures, I follow Tim Oakes’ invitation to use the ‘BRI as an exercise in infrastructural thinking’.Footnote 44 However, instead of examining the mutual conditioning of material, technical and political effects of and on evolving infrastructures within a technopolitical frame,Footnote 45 I explore the infrastructural effect of social and economic borderland practices and relations. Using neither the BRI nor concrete material infrastructure projects as the initial entry point or prevailing optics, my long-term research, also partly preceding the BRI, foregrounds northern Lao traders’ transnational worlds of cross-border mobilities, social relations, commercial experimentation and aspiration in the Yunnan-Laos-Thailand borderland economy.Footnote 46 Hailing from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds, they flexibly cross borders through various infrastructural channels to trade a wide range of Chinese and Thai consumer goods. Closely accompanying mobile traders selling Thai fruits in Laos and China, shopkeepers at local Lao marketplaces, and households regularly selling Thai commodities at trade fairs in China, I demonstrate their indispensable role for the everyday workings of the dynamic borderland economy of China, Laos and Thailand. I argue that their central, yet largely invisible, positioning is rooted in their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’. ‘Smallness’ refers here to the traders’ conscious strategies and interiorised habits of framing and performing their transnational economic practices in a self-deprecating manner, reinforcing the apparent ordinariness and triviality of their trade in mundane commodities and self-essentialising their inferior regional economic, and by extension cultural, standing.Footnote 47 This empirical tonality of ordinariness might be disillusioning to the possible scholarly desire to tell extraordinary stories building on potentially tense and conflictual dichotomies, as ‘[a] focus on hostility or other clear binaries offers easily translated drama’.Footnote 48 This is, for example, reflected in (Asian) borderland anthropology with the often prevailing epistemological dichotomy of ethnic, traditional margins on the one hand, and central state and global forces of modernisation on the other. Consequential tensions between the well-tried conceptual layers of the state, its imposed development/infrastructure projects, and local ethnic minorities also guide the research questions of Alessandro Rippa's work on Borderland Infrastructures at western China's borders with Pakistan and Myanmar:
How does infrastructure development affect cross-border livelihood in today's China? What is the place and role of ethnic minorities in larger processes of development? How are newly envisioned forms of connectivity as part of the BRI agenda affecting pre-existing mobilities and forms of exchange?Footnote 49
These questions already imply right at the outset inevitable dichotomies between ‘infrastructure development’ and ‘cross-border livelihood’, between ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘larger processes of development’, and between BRI-related new forms of connectivity and ‘pre-existing mobilities and forms of exchange’. Large-scale development and local small-scale livelihoods, ethnic tradition and state modernity, and different temporalities of connectivity all clash in the borderland. A look into AbdouMaliq Simone's work on ‘people as infrastructure’ is again instructive here as it centres on forms of social collaboration, also between antagonists.Footnote 50 Applied to borderlands, Andrew Walker introduces in his pioneering work The legend of the golden boat: Regulation, trade and traders in the borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma the notion of ‘collaborative borders’ that reveal ‘complex and subtle collaborations between local initiative and state power’.Footnote 51 Key to these co–productions of cross-border regimes is regulation as an underlying, continually reconfigured social practice historically shared by a multitude of borderland actors that defies clear binaries of formal and informal trade as well as of (ethnic) margins or peripheries and centres of state power.
As mentioned earlier, I render visible cross-border traders’ continual local reproduction of borderland infrastructures of transnational connectivity, maybe counter-intuitively, through the ethnographic lens of articulated ‘smallness’ and insignificance, and not primarily through large formulations of the ubiquitous scholarly BRI-infrastructure complex focusing on spectacular projects and exceptional zones of development. In the following section, I will therefore take the reader to local marketplaces in Luang Namtha to demonstrate how Chinese infrastructures, or at least infrastructural connectivity and proximity to China, are socially lived on an everyday basis—and often in rather ordinary, inconspicuous ways.
Marketplaces in Luang Namtha: Local sites of Chinese urban infrastructure
Undoubtedly, the traders’ everyday worlds of finding ways to experiment with, and in turn continually sustain, transnational commodity flows between China and Thailand have been gravitating towards China—however, not necessarily in the sense of being in the shadow, or constituting a helpless venue, of China's large-scale BRI dreams, but also as a fertile ground for Chinese-oriented life plans and livelihoods in terms of education, and entrepreneurial and urban aspirations. This has resulted in a growing number of direct experiences in and encounters with neighbouring China, with more people frequently ‘going up’ to China. The phrase ‘going up’ is part of the quotidian mental mapping of cross-border mobility I frequently overheard at the marketplaces in Luang Namtha province (mainly in Muang Sing and Luang Namtha town), either asking whether or saying that one would, or did, go up or down. ‘Going up’ refers to crossing the border into China whereas ‘going down’ means crossing the border into Thailand, therefore roughly mirroring the cartographic reality of the overland link between China and Thailand (following the course of the ‘Kunming–Bangkok Highway’, see again map 2). Greetings, stories, rumours, gossip, jokes—they all largely revolve around previous or planned trips, and commodities moving, to and from ‘up’ and ‘down’. Those have now increasingly shifted towards ‘going up’ for diverse reasons, besides cross-border trade also for education, healthcare, employment, and leisure and amusement (pai lin, literally ‘go to play’ or ‘go for fun’). Increasingly ‘going up’, people also bring back down their impressions, experiences and stories of displayed, and partly consumed, Chinese modernity—or various materialised facets of the ‘Chinese dream’.
At the same time, the local marketplaces where these local ‘Chinese dreams’—or dreams of China—are articulated and exchanged among and between vendors and customers, are themselves Chinese material infrastructures, following Chinese investment in building new and extending or refurbishing old markets across northern Laos, especially in Luang Namtha and Oudomxai provinces.Footnote 52 Displaying increasingly Chinese everyday commodities and accommodating growing numbers of Chinese vendors, they are part of a larger, rapidly emerging Chinese urban infrastructure of regional bus stations, hospitals, clinics, supermarkets, hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and diverse entertainment venues. Initially mainly catering to new inflows of Chinese entrepreneurial migrants since the early 1990s, these urban amenities are now also increasingly frequented by local residents. This is especially true for restaurants, bars, karaoke establishments and nightclubs, which are visited primarily by younger generations. Apart from the symbolic omnipresence of Chinese characters written on signboards and advertisements, this unfolding Chinese urbanity also finds its way into everyday Lao vocabulary, thereby demonstrating its integration into local lifeworlds, for instance, if referring to Chinese-run hotels (binguan), restaurants (fanguan), supermarkets (chaoshi) or specific Chinese food such as hotpot (huoguo), Chinese-style barbeque (shaokao) or noodles (miantiao). Notably, these instances of Chinese urban lifestyle and consumption are not only brought in by Chinese migrants, but also by emergent Lao entrepreneurs who want to bring their experiences in China (as students, workers or just as curious travellers) back to the local economy. For example, at Luang Namtha's night market, frequented by locals, (Chinese) businessmen and tourists alike, a young couple started to sell Sichuan-style MalatangFootnote 53 which became highly popular among local Lao and Chinese residents. Interestingly, in English, they advertise their food as ‘Chinese-style mixed fresh vegetable and noodle soup’ while they label it in Lao as ‘Haw hot pot’ (jum ho), underlining the common practice of using the local Lao ethnonym ‘Haw’, initially reserved for Lao citizens of Yunnanese descent, to refer to ‘China’ (muang ho) and ‘the Chinese’ (khon ho) in general.Footnote 54 Similarly, Chinese-style barbeque (shaokao) is being increasingly sold on the streets both by Chinese newcomers and Lao residents, attracting mostly younger crowds as a popular nightlife activity.
Thus, China-induced infrastructural development and change also bring along newly emerging social infrastructures of conviviality, entailing ‘the intrinsic ambivalence of living together across local differences’.Footnote 55 These have not been paid much attention to in aforementioned scholarship focusing instead on Chinese ‘enclaves’ or ‘instant cities’ in ‘exceptional spaces’ of SEZs in northern Laos, which implies minimal social interactions between Chinese and Lao residents. These local on-the-ground realities of socially lived and negotiated Chinese presence and infrastructure, here only sketched out for Luang Namtha, call for further fine-grained studies on everyday encounters and social relations among a wide range of Chinese and Lao actors in more ‘ordinary’—and not exceptional—localities. Chris Lyttleton's and Yunxia Li's work on ‘rubber's affective economies’ is a promising start in this direction, examining personal and intimate relations between Chinese rubber investors and Lao (mainly Akha) rubber plantation workers in the Muang Sing and Muang Long districts of Luang Namtha province.Footnote 56 Certainly not without its problems, Lyttleton and Li conclude that ‘[t]he influx of Chinese people and goods into Laos has created a spectrum of opportunities based on proliferating personal connections’.Footnote 57 It would be particularly fruitful to further research how the new generation in northern Laos will live alongside a rising number of Chinese newcomers, especially against the backdrop that a rapidly growing number of young people is already being sent to high schools, vocational colleges and universities in China, which I could clearly observe for the children of most of my interlocutors. The often-heard pragmatic, seemingly fatalistic, contemplation among my interlocutors to simply ‘rent land to the Chinese’ (sao thi din hai khon jin)—provided they themselves, or relatives or friends, did own land—was often coupled with the expectation, or hope, that this could finance their children's future education in China. Education-driven Lao youth mobility and migration to China has been largely absent in scholarship conventionally focusing on youth moving to ThailandFootnote 58 or Vietnam.Footnote 59
Returning to Luang Namtha's local marketplaces, the intricate and at times contradictory ways how cross-border traders, market vendors and consumers frame their increased social and economic relations with Chinese actors reveal ‘agonistic intimacies’,Footnote 60 entailing ‘the copresence of conflict and cohabitation’Footnote 61 that leads to ‘a picture of relatedness, whose coordinates are not predisposed entirely toward either oppositional negation or communitarian affirmation’.Footnote 62 More relevant to my study, Juan Zhang and Martin Saxer apply the notion of ‘agonistic intimacies’ to the ‘experiences and realities of everyday neighbouring’ across China's borderlands.Footnote 63 Their described ‘art of neighbouring’ entails ‘[n]eighbourly agonism [that] operates at both local and transnational scales, activating antagonism and inspiration at the same time’.Footnote 64 Thus, at the marketplace, discussions among market vendors and customers about Chinese commodities often ended in heated remarks on mainly negative Chinese stereotypes, relating the allegedly low quality of Chinese products to the general Chinese personal character (nisai khong khon jin) of cheating, greed and rudeness. At the same time, they expressed admiration of Chinese smartness (salat) and hard-working attitude (khayan), ultimately relating it to the larger picture of China's successful rapid development and modernisation, living up to the ‘Chinese dream’, against which they essentialised and mocked themselves as foolish and lazy.
Similarly, a rising number of new Lao cross-border traders coupled their repeated assertions of the convenience and easiness to cross the border to China and directly interact with Chinese traders with pejorative complaints about their misbehaviour and ‘troublesome’ (lamkhan) character. It somehow seemed as if my Lao interlocutors relied on the overly negative framing of their Chinese counterparts to make sense of, and thereby underline, their skills of successfully overcoming the difficult character and constant chicaneries of their Chinese trading partners, which is all again articulated in the downplaying language of ‘smallness’ and ordinariness—stressing their relative ‘smallness’ vis-à-vis their Chinese neighbours and the triviality of cross-border mobility.
I eventually shift now the focus to the ‘China–Laos Railway’—the most recent, largest and most spectacular, and therefore already seemingly over-reported, Chinese infrastructure project in Laos—, as its local perception is emblematic of the awkward coexistence of euphoria and scepticism towards the agonistically intimate Chinese neighbour as outlined above.
The ‘China–Laos Railway’: Delivery of the ‘Chinese dream’?
Inaugurated on schedule in December 2021 despite the Covid-19 crisis, this BRI flagship project openly displays Chinese state-of-art engineering skills, mastering difficult mountainous terrain with 72 tunnels and 170 bridges.Footnote 65 Although Laos has not seen any substantive railway infrastructure before, many residents of Luang Namtha are already familiar with China's rapid railway development. This is especially true for the growing number of vocational students who study in China (not only in adjacent Yunnan province, but also further away in Guizhou, Guangxi or Sichuan).
In the early stage of my fieldwork in July 2015, only five months before the official ground-breaking ceremony for the new railway in Vientiane, I happened to listen to a young male customer sitting next to me during one of the numerous mornings I spent having breakfast at the Muang Sing market. He was talking in Lao about his recent trips to China and describing the trains there. Unable to hold my curiosity, I took a chance to ask him where exactly he went to in China. I chose to ask him in Chinese to test his articulated familiarity with China. And indeed, he instantly responded in Chinese, showing his linguistic dexterity characteristic for this borderland region, in which I was able to fully participate by constantly switching between Thai, Lao and Chinese. He explained to me that he had studied Chinese in Guiyang in Guizhou province. What followed was his detailed description of how to get there from Muang Sing, carefully mapping the district's connectivity to its Chinese neighbour. He became even more enthusiastic upon knowing that I also figured in his transnational map: Kunming, where I had studied Chinese language, also constituted his focal gateway for his further travels into China. He would first travel by bus to Kunming (via Luang Namtha and Boten)Footnote 66 to catch the 10-hour-long train ride to Guiyang, which would round off almost two full days of travelling.Footnote 67 This prompted him to express his full admiration of the Chinese train system as it displayed an impressive rail network and high standards of comfort, technology and engineering skills. He did not grow tired of stressing the engineering craftsmanship of the exemplary Kunming–Guiyang route, conquering challenging mountainous terrain through several tunnels and bridges, which he subsequently set against the current condition of the transportation infrastructure in Laos. Again, it should be noted here that he still referred to the old railway, preceding the high-speed connection cutting the ten hours of travelling to two. He was not the last person I encountered during my fieldwork in Laos who jokingly told me that while in Laos they were building heavily winding and zigzagging roads, the Chinese simply drew a straight line, no matter what obstacle was to be overcome. This reflects well to what extent increasing contact with Chinese progress and modernity informs perceptions and (re-)evaluations of local living conditions and the current economic state and performance in Laos in general. Seeing Laos in serious need for catching up with China's economic development, he repeatedly highlighted that he would readily welcome the ‘China–Laos Railway’, which would carry the very same, or even more advanced, Chinese engineering excellence of impressive structures of tunnels, bridges and railway stations he had been witnessing excitedly during his stays in China.
Revisiting Luang Namtha at least once a year between 2017 and 2019, after actual construction eventually started in the end of 2016, no small number of my interlocutors embraced the ‘China–Laos Railway’ as a logical, timely and necessary project. No doubt, at the same time, their expectations were paired with scepticism, mistrust and also fear, questioning long-term benefits and possible negative consequences. Regarding the latter, sensitive issues indeed loom large, such as imminent resettlement and opaque, often delayed and likely under-valued compensation, with over four thousand households affected.Footnote 68 While talking to people directly affected by the construction was outside the scope of my research,Footnote 69 the reaction of my informants, who were not directly impacted, was striking. In Luang Namtha town, for instance, many told me jokingly that they were fine with the planned railway, as long as it would not run through their own houses or lands.Footnote 70 While living in some safe distance from the railway, many residents in and around Luang Namtha town complained at the same time that the rail route would be too far away, expressing their incomprehension that the capital of Luang Namtha province would not have direct access to a train station. In fact, the nearest train station would be in Nateuy, about 40 km away and near Boten and the Chinese border. They thus openly embrace developmental visions of regional connectivity and the underlying ‘infrastructural fetishism’Footnote 71 of economic belts or corridors, roads and railways, as long as those do not harm them individually, and better yet, as long as those somehow benefit them. In a sense, they are implicitly continuing, or are complicit in, ‘infrastructural violence’.Footnote 72
This is reminiscent of Erik Harms’ observation in the construction of a new urban zone in Ho Chi Minh City that most residents, even directly affected by imminent demolition, ‘do not regret the idea of the project, which they generally consider to be beautiful. They resent the way it has been carried out […]’.Footnote 73 As for the residents of Ho Chi Minh City subscribing in principle to the state rhetoric of urban improvement and beautification, residents in Luang Namtha expect the state to properly deliver and implement the promise of infrastructural connectedness and development. Thus, the overall logic of state-delivered development within the political-economic system of the ‘socialist market economy’Footnote 74 is not much challenged; instead of neoliberal demands for less state intervention, many called for a better, more efficient state with stronger leadership, thereby displaying their ‘desiring return to the state and its […] utopian promises, the appeal of which persists and sometimes even becomes stronger the more they fail to be realized’.Footnote 75 Notably, they pit their desires for state-led development against the capabilities of Chinese state leadership. In this regard, not a few expressed their admiration of China's strong, resolute leadership under Xi Jinping. Interestingly, reflecting their everyday lived and thought world of transnational connectedness, they often juxtaposed their perception of an efficiently led, stable China with political instability and turmoil in their other large neighbour, Thailand. Instead of political power struggles and intrigues, repeating coup after coup, Xi Jinping came up with a clear vision, with his ‘Chinese dream’, so their common mantra was, thereby also praising his alleged fight against corruption, which they hoped to happen someday in Laos as well. Consequently, the other large, often simultaneous, component of perceiving the ‘China–Laos Railway’—scepticism, mistrust, pessimism, fear—was not merely directed at ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’. It was also an expression of concern about the Lao state's inability to fully comprehend and handle Chinese infrastructural projects. One of the concerns expressed the most was short-sightedness of the Lao government, lacking any long-term strategy of generating potential sustainable development benefits.
A ‘Study on the Benefits of China–Laos High Speed Railway Construction’, published in 2017 by the newly founded ‘Research Center on China’ at the National University of Laos,Footnote 76 might back their concerns. While serving the centre's mission ‘to draw lessons from China to develop Laos’ (own translation), the study merely lists several short-term benefits.Footnote 77 Enhanced connectivity between China and Thailand is ranked first, with income generation from transit fees as the main benefit, whereas sustainable long-term development benefits are not clearly mentioned, prompting the question whether Laos rather remains a ‘pass-through country’ instead of developing into a land-linked country.Footnote 78 Indeed, the local reality of the governmental land-linked vision has been based on, and seems, for the near future, to continue to focus on, the status of a transit country—that is, cashing in on transit fees. A look at the R3 highway, the Lao section of the ‘Kunming–Bangkok Highway’, clearly illustrates this unchanged priority: as I could witness during my most recent trip on the highway in September 2019, toll gates were already erected, although more than 11 years after its opening in 2008.
Applying this to the ‘China–Laos Railway’, local sentiment in Luang Namtha also revolved around the anticipation that the practice of arbitrarily imposing transit and other fees would somehow prevail, often pointing the finger to larger underlying issues of translating external investment and development aid domestically into deep-seated corruption, clientelism and cronyism, which are not only confined to the railway project, but also to other related development projects. After all, the ‘China–Laos Railway’ does not only connect China with the capital of Laos, but also links together China-backed Special Economic Zones. While the first station in Laos is located within the Mohan–Boten Economic Cooperation Zone, run by Yunnan Haicheng Holding, Vientiane's terminal is 1.5 km away from the Saysettha Development Zone, jointly funded by the municipal government of Vientiane and Yunnan Provincial Overseas Investment Co., Ltd. (YOIC). In this regard, instead of understanding the emergence of these ‘Chinese enclaves’ in northern Laos as the ‘absence of the state in SEZ border governmentality’,Footnote 79 Danielle Tan notes ‘that, far from eroding the power of the Lao communist regime, the new Chinese transnational networks […] play a key role in the production of a neoliberal governmentality, that allows the Lao state to consolidate its grip over its territorial margins’.Footnote 80 Moreover, ‘devised by the Lao government to meet the challenges of globalization and to maintain its power at the same time [, t]his new technique of governing need not be read as a withdrawal of the Lao state from economic affairs and an incapacity to regulate or control Chinese private actors; rather, it illustrates an extension of indirect rule methods through which elements of Lao sovereignty are vested in private corporations for the state to have access to development’.Footnote 81
In other words, Luang Namtha's small-scale traders, and other local actors, knowingly cannot rely on the Lao state to realise their ‘Chinese dreams’ or China-oriented aspirations of improved livelihoods promised in infrastructures of land-linkedness. To boil down the local sentiment in yet another way: instead of properly and responsibly delivering to its citizens the ‘Chinese dream’—a notion most of my interlocutors endorsed with admiration, assuming that China would be indeed capable to realise the ‘Chinese dream’ for its citizens—the Lao party-state elites would merely aim at getting rich on the ‘Chinese dream’, dreaming it at the expense of its own citizens. Thus, small-scale traders need to rely on their own entrepreneurial experimentations and ingenuity.
Concluding thoughts
Over the years of conducting fieldwork in Luang Namtha province, more than a few interlocutors shared with me following line, often with a mischievous and meaningful smile: ‘Soon, northern Laos will be part of Southern China!’ (phak nuea khong lao kaipen phak tai khong jin). Instead of pointing to the simple narrative of pure fear of Chinese neo-colonial ambitions, which other scholars see in similar local quotes,Footnote 82 this statement might refer to a simple joke, anger, uncertainty, fear, worry, fatalism, resilience, pragmatism and aspiration all at the same time. Seemingly only a trivial and unserious remark, not seldom accompanied with some Beer Lao, this quote brilliantly summarises—in its form, ambiguity, and how it was expressed—the essence of the intricate nature of uncertain, but not necessarily dooming, China-induced or China-oriented infrastructural futures in northern Laos, both challenging and promising at the same time. For example, complaining about the ongoing Chinese-funded extension of Luang Namtha's municipal marketplace, allegedly mainly catering to Chinese retailers, numerous Lao interlocutors entertained at the same time openly the idea of opening a stall there—after all, the stalls were more spacious, modern (than samai) and beautiful (ngam). Thus, there is again the prospect of locally co-producing and modifying Chinese infrastructures for their own benefit. As with the language of insignificance and ordinariness, common among cross-border traders in Luang Namtha, local China-sceptical, or even anti-Chinese, sentiments should not readily and hastily be taken at face value. Rather, they need to be closely examined and complicated in the actually lived, and intrinsically ambivalent, social contexts, livelihoods and lifeworlds of the people behind them. These sentiments thus need to be read against the backdrop of the complex, seemingly counter-intuitive, and messy everyday realities of ‘neighbouring China’Footnote 83 or ‘being-with’Footnote 84 China and the Chinese.
‘Soon, northern Laos will be part of Southern China’: the emphasis should be on northern Laos, understood as a historically rooted cosmopolitan intersection. While their locally rooted transnational worlds inevitably gravitate more towards China, small-scale traders, and other local actors, still can rely on their skilfully mastered entrepreneurial experimentation, versatility and resilience to live with, and actively impact on, China-driven developments. While northern Laos, or for that matter Southeast Asia, might be seen as ‘both a testing ground for China's development as a great power and as a gateway for its global expansion in the future’,Footnote 85 China will also be a testing ground for aspiring traders and entrepreneurs in northern Laos and beyond who are willing, and strongly expect, to have a share in the ‘Chinese dream’.
