Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infrastructural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infrastructures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim.

Air pollution created by agricultural burning has become a critical environmental problem across Southeast Asia, but the solution to it remains unclear. In this essay I discuss the haze crisis in a small community in Northern Thailand, and show how an increase in contract farming is accompanied by a decrease in agricultural spirit rituals. I argue that this change represents a broader shift in the cosmopolitical ecology of the region, as large agricultural businesses hide behind continuing narratives about ‘slash-and-burn’ ‘hill tribes’ to advance an environmentally unsustainable agenda.

This article investigates memories of the Cold War era in Thailand, through online practices on Facebook pages administered by residents of a borderland province in the Northeast that was a key front line during the conflict. The possibilities for greater access to, and dissemination of, information afforded by digital media technologies have created a new environment for the production of shared knowledge about the past. However, on these pages, instead of converging plural memories, participatory online culture and the use of the language of memory have enabled the creation of distinct and separated memory spaces. This article calls attention in particular to what is silenced and absent in what people are sharing online. It argues that the deep-seated ethnic politics of the Cold War have an afterlife in Thai society—especially in the country's ‘margins’ where the conflict was most violent—that is reflected as much by what is not said as by what is said online.

This article, grounded in archival research from Chinese border prefectures, delves into the complexities of migration dynamics, specifically the phenomena of exodus from and return to China following the Communist takeover in 1949. It reveals how various reforms, enforced collectivisation and religious restrictions disrupted local lives, causing social panic and identity crises, which led to the disintegration of everyday life among borderland communities. Local residents’ responses predominantly involved crossing the border to seek refuge in Burma. The article critically scrutinises local authorities’ efforts to alleviate resultant instability, with the aim of retaining the borderland populace and attracting back those who had left, while also imposing the ideologies of the new communist state. Rather than viewing these ‘illicit’ cross-border movements as mere acts of resistance to governance, this study argues that they involved active negotiations for a stable daily life amid socio-political upheaval. The research contributes new insights into the micro-level mechanisms of state-building, and the integration of borderland peoples into the new Communist regime. Amid mass emigration and repatriation, state engagement permeated daily life in borderland communities, facilitating national identity formation and nation-state construction.

This article explores the large-scale deployment of Chinese soldiers during the Vietnam War as part of China's aid to Laos, especially its logistical and military support for the Pathet Lao, in the geopolitical context of competition with America in mainland Southeast Asia. This article spotlights the history of China's clandestine campaign in Laos in the late 1960s to 1970s, based on recent articles, books, unpublished or informally published memoirs by and interviews with ex-servicemen, mainly lower-ranking officers, soldiers and army engineers who found themselves in an unknown Southeast Asian country. While the Chinese troops were spurred on by their sense of patriotism and socialist internationalism, they also desired peace so that they could return home. Many of the then young soldiers struggled to adjust to a campaign fought in the unfamiliar environment of northern Laos, and were traumatised by the sight of fallen comrades. It is these very same Chinese soldiers who fought in Laos who have become the main advocates of the declassification of China's secret war through their publications and social media postings, although their accounts are not officially endorsed or published for the mass market and this knowledge remains largely within their circles.

During the Second World War, France recruited unskilled labourers, known as Lính thợ or ‘Worker-Soldiers’, from the Indochina Union (today's Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), mainly from the Tonkin (Northern) and Northern Annam regions. This article examines French policies towards Lính thợ from 1939 to the 1950s, which aimed to recruit the most cost-effective, healthiest, hardiest, skilled, and ‘compliant’ labour force. However, these policies had unintended consequences. They exacerbated existing conflicts within the Lính thợ community, and also led to their marginalisation and exclusion from French civil society. As a result, Lính thợ had to restructure their community and rethink their goals and strategies to claim their legitimate rights, especially after 1945. This article highlights the tensions and challenges faced by Lính thợ in France, and the complex relationship between colonial powers and migrant labourers imported from the colonies.

Until recently, scholars have generally neglected to examine the socialist inspirations of the Republic of Indonesia's most influential Islamic party, Masjumi (Partai Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, 1943–60) during Indonesia's parliamentary democracy period (1950–59). Drawing on books published by Masjumi politicians as well as an Indonesian translation of the Syrian Islamic socialist Mustafa al-Siba'i's Islamic Socialism (1949), this article explores how two prominent Masjumi members, Zainal Abidin Ahmad and Isa Anshary, drew on socialist ideas in forming their political visions for Indonesia, as part of a broader ongoing debate in the wider Muslim world. In contrast to popular perceptions of Indonesian political Islam today, as well as Cold War-centric characterisations of Islamic political parties, this article shows how Muslim democrats in 1950s Indonesia emphasised socio-economic justice and compassion in their articulations of political Islam.

This article seeks to trace the evolution of North Vietnam's strategy in Laos from 1945 to 1975. I have three points to argue. First, the Vietnamese dealt with Laos on the basis of the Indochinese idea, not only during the immediate anticolonial period as scholars have argued, but also in the decades of struggle against the United States. Second, while the Indochinese idea treated North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as an interconnected entity, different priorities were attached to each component; revolutionary efforts differed from country to country. Third, the Vietnamese communists were flexible in translating this idea to adapt to the changing realities over three decades, from armed to political struggles, or a combination of both at different times.

This article examines the month-long epidemic outbreak of Asian Flu in 1957 in the Colony of Singapore that occurred as part of the larger 1957–58 Asian Flu Pandemic. The notably short duration of this epidemic outbreak in Singapore relative to the prolonged Asian Flu experience in other countries poses significant socio-historical intrigue. In response, this article constructs a socio-historical narrative of Singapore's societal response to the event, focusing specifically on the reactions of the state and the colony residents. Studying the social narratives that emerged from official and popular discourses, this article argues that Singapore's societal response to the epidemic outbreak bifurcated drastically between the state and the public as a result of different and contradictory perceptions of public health and epidemic severity. Owing to extenuating circumstances, state interventions were, overall, reactive and insufficient, permitting the Asian Flu's rapid spread in the colony. The public, however, sought active control over their epidemic fates, as they were driven by a mixture of fear, greed, and civic duty to self-medicate, profiteer, and provide aid to one another. Consulting an eclectic range of hitherto underutilised primary sources, the article constructs a compelling socio-historical narrative that furthers understanding of Singapore's state-society relations.

When the French occupied Cochinchina in 1862 they encountered many issues related to language and communication that hindered their ability to effectively govern the local population. This article will discuss how the French attempted to establish a College of Interpreters to institutionalise interpreters and to enforce a translation regime where quốc ngữ served as the intermediary script between Chinese and French to overcome translation challenges. Their translation surveillance system, via legal protocols, ultimately failed to discipline local interpreters and regulate translation, nor did it protect French colonial interests and agenda in Vietnam, due to pedagogical, financial and administrative constraints.

In the long history of Chinese emigration, men left home to work abroad, leaving family members behind. While overseas, they sent money to their relatives along with remittance letters (qiaopi). Many qiaopi were formulaic documents prepared by professional letter writers, but those sent by Huang Kaiwu to his wife between 1903 and 1916 provide information on changing family values and gender norms in the years leading up to the Chinese Revolution and Republic. Huang was a textile merchant in the Philippines, a leader of the Chinese community in Manila, and a revolutionary who actively supported the 1911 Revolution. His wife lived with members of his family in his home village. His letters reveal tensions between tradition and change both on his part and on hers. Written at a time of momentous socio-political change and under the influence of Chinese nationalism, they provide insights into how modernist thinking played out in one Chinese migrant family and enrich academic understanding of the Chinese diaspora especially in the early twentieth century.

Scholars studying international retirement migration (IRM) refer to lifestyle migration to explain the motives and aspirations of older individuals who choose to relocate out of their home country. Here I investigate French retirees’ reasons for migrating to Southeast Asia, and their sense of purpose in doing so. Interviews with 17 retirees living in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and Vientiane, Laos, whose narratives evoked some degree of historical relevance, suggest that certain migration choices are best understood in the context of a postcolonial moment comprising colonialism and its dissolution, the Cold War, and the postcolonial diaspora. Such an approach illuminates the relationship between history, migration, and pensioners’ respective biographies in explaining their retirement journeys to former colonies, and in how these experiences foster multifaceted hybrid identities embedded in various historical moments.

This article investigates P. Ramlee's little-known attempt at transnationalising Malay cinema in the early 1960s. Using biographical records, newspaper reports and film magazines, I trace the star's earliest direct contact with Hong Kong cinema, his plans to make Malay films in Hong Kong, the controversy that ensued, and the outcomes of these grand plans. Situating this episode in its historical context, this article unsettles standard narratives of P. Ramlee, and Malay and Malaysian film histories. It demonstrates that, as opposed to the seemingly inevitable ethnonational route, and in contrast to the hypernationalist characterisation of P. Ramlee today, a transnational model was once envisioned through P. Ramlee as a potential future for Malay cinema in the face of tumultuous geopolitical changes. It also brings to light the complex role that labour activism played in shaping post-studio era development of Malay cinema, and the roots of Malaysian national cinema.

This Forum reflects the stimulating conversations we had as participants in a roundtable at the 2023 Boston meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The discussion centred on the position of women (as both contributors and subjects) in competing visions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Our overall goals were to explore how women contributed to these visions and the extent to which their hopes were realised. In the process, numerous questions arose: What were women's experiences in these modernities? How were their roles influenced by class, ethnicity, religion, and age? And, finally, how do analyses of women-centred involvement inform broader understandings of social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the region? The contributors reflect on their own trajectory in the study of women's history, the sources they have been able to leverage, the intersection between ‘modernity’ and nationalism, the related issue of women's position in postcolonial nation-states, and the question of how ideas of sexuality (in the family, society, politics) were changing. Throughout the Forum, we argue that the experience of women, and their (often but not necessarily agentic) contribution, is necessary to fully grasp the region's multiple entanglements with ‘modernity/ies’ in a variety of fields.