Regionalization and the Nation: Ethnic Minority Rubber in the Borderlands of China and Laos

Janet Sturgeon, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University

Akha and Tai (Dai in Chinese) farmers in Xishuangbanna, China, have long had close ties with relatives and friends in the neighbouring Sing district of Laos. Cross-border movement, trade, and labour exchanges have taken place for centuries. This paper examines recent reworkings of cross-border arrangements for the cultivation of rubber in light of China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization. Large state rubber farms in Xishuangbanna have recently been privatized as "companies" to allow them to expand internationally. Although national agreements between China and Laos have in principle granted approval for Chinese rubber concessions in Sing to help with opium eradication, Chinese rubber "companies" have run in bureaucratic snags at different administrative levels in Laos. Ethnic minority rubber farmers in Xishuangbanna have meanwhile rapidly extended rubber across this border through share-cropping agreements with relatives and friends in Sing. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in Xishuangbanna and in Sing district, this paper examines the vagaries of "regionalization," some of which is related to state or Asian Development Bank efforts to increase trade and economic growth, and some of which is generated by ethnic minority rubber farmers without outside help. Power relations between China and Laos matter in both instances. In relation to large Chinese rubber companies, Lao administrators are wary of Chinese economic dominance through land concessions. For Akha and Dai rubber farmers from China, the story is different. Long cast as "backward" members of Chinese society, these farmers are getting rich on rubber, and now see themselves as rising in modernity in contrast to their "backward" Lao relatives, whom they are "helping" to "develop". Interactions across this border, whether involving large rubber concessions, or farmer-to-farmer share-cropping arrangements, are all mediated by Chinese economic dynamism as well as by Chinese understandings of "progress" and "modernity". Efforts to launch rubber cultivation in Laos, whether formal or informal, reinforce the distinction between "the developed" and those "in need of help."

Janet Sturgeon received her doctorate from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2000. Since 2004 she has been in the geography department at Simon Fraser University, where she is now an associate professor. Her work looks at access to resources and landscape transformations among ethnic minority peoples along the borders of China, Laos, Thailand, and Burma. She is interested in how borders are constituted and transgressed, and how globalization is changing livelihoods and identities for farmers. Her most recent research was funded by an NSF group project to look at farmers' adoption of cash crops as a result of the new superhighway linking Kunming (China) to Bangkok (Thailand). According to the Asian Development Bank, what used to be called the Golden Triangle has been remade into an integrated region called the Golden Economic Quadrangle. Sturgeon's research has brought to light the complex and unintended outcomes of regionalization. She has published numerous articles and a book, Border Landscapes: the Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand (University of Washington Press, 2005).

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