Roses & rifles : experiments of governing on the China-Laos frontier

Abstract

This thesis explores the use of the border in governing on the China-Laos frontier. By focusing on the notion of ‘frontier’, the thesis breaks with views of border regions as sites of anomie and state avoidance. It presents the frontier not simply as a field of confrontation between state and society but instead, as a “middle ground” (White 1991), a socio-economic and cultural space where the practices of peripheral subjects intersect with central powers, producing heterogeneous scenarios of manoeuvring, negotiation, collaboration, and resistance. By embracing a view of power as simultaneously totalising and individualising, the thesis also stresses the ongoing significance of the nation-state as a regulatory agent of human, capital and goods mobility across borders. It questions the dissolution of borders suggested by some globalisation theories and highlights the current paradox of the simultaneous reinforcement of state authority and the re-opening of international borders in mainland Southeast Asia. It argues that the practices enacted by border dwellers are not to be attributed to a waning of state power on the periphery due to the inroads of globalisation. Rather, they are the product of an ongoing governing pattern of “experimentation under hierarchy” (Heilmann 2008). This is a mechanism whereby the margins are allowed to experiment autonomously under the scrutiny of the Lao and Chinese centres. In this sense, local experimentation flourishes like ‘roses’. When these bloom into a centrifugal vortex, they are contained by an authoritarian backlash which, in extreme cases, resorts to ‘rifles’. Through a historical account and four contemporary ethnographic case studies, the thesis critically interrogates four main themes raised in the literature on theories of globalisation: “graduated sovereignty” (Ong 1999, 2000), unconstrained cross-border mobility, crossborder ethnic re-connectedness, and marginal resistance to the centre of power. First, an analysis of Chinese-driven rubber investments in north-western Laos demonstrates that the circulation of capital across the borders does not translate into an anomalous variegation of sovereignty. The historical account suggests that graduation in sovereignty is a governing model which, despite many changes from pre-colonial, to colonial and post-colonial times, has been variously applied throughout history by the major political entities in the Upper Mekong region. A second case study argues that the socio-economic initiatives of ethnic Akha villagers in Laos across the border are not an effect of “zomia” (Scott 2008, forthcoming; van Schendel 2002), a mechanism whereby unruly peripheral subjects repel central power. They are an expression of an incomplete process of modem state formation and the remnants of pre-colonial patterns of governing. A third case study examines how the notion of belonging among a group of Tai youth in a border village in China is not articulated through a trans-frontier pan-ethnic sentiment of resistance to centralising policies. Rather, it is expressed through social and cultural identification with the Chinese government’s agenda of development and modernisation. A final case study argues that the struggles of a group of Tai traders to assert themselves as “flexible citizens” (Ong 1999) of the frontier demonstrate that mobility of subjects and objects across the border remains constrained by the structuring system of the state, despite the claims of regional economic integration. Therefore, in contrast with the fluidity of the ‘frontier’, the ‘border’ continues to maintain its binding significance and remains the focal point of state regulation.