Grounding Chinese investment: encounters between Chinese capital and local land politics in Laos

ABSTRACT

Mainstream portrayals of Chinese overseas land investments tend to treat Chinese capital as monolithic, synonymous with the Chinese state, and extracting resources from other countries unhindered. These portrayals flatten host country landscapes where investment occurs, obscure the embeddedness and diversity of Chinese investors, and ignore the spatially contingent channels through which Chinese capital, actors, and goods flow. In response, this article suggests that methodological shifts in the land grabs literature could address recent calls for grounding studies of global China. It compares the cases of Chinese banana and rubber investments in Laos to demonstrate that sub-national state actors, histories and material realities of land politics, and the diversity of investors across sectors and regions must be considered. The contrast between how the two types of Chinese agricultural investments have been established and governed is best understood through comparative, grounded research attentive to multiple perspectives and scales.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• foreign investments
• land grabs
• Belt and Road Initiative
• Laos
• Yunnan province

Acknowledgements

The work presented here benefited greatly from the BRICS Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (BRICS) intellectual community, particularly from the inputs of Dr. Gustavo Oliveira who is a brilliant editor and a tireless supporter of (other) early career scholars. I also owe a great debt to members of my two writing groups at UC Berkeley, to the institutions who hosted my field work in Laos – especially to Phouphet Kyophilavong and Thoumthone Vongvisouk at the National University of Laos, Justine Sylvester at Village Focus International, and Vong Nanthavong, Michael Epprecht, and Micah Ingalls at the Centre for Development and Environment. Research assistance from Gloria Chen and lively exchange with Cecilie Friis, Hilary Smith, Soythavanh Mienmany, Hyeonji Kim, and Christina Cilento all aided my research on rubber and banana bans specifically. My research assistant and partner, Olivier Celhay, helped in both data collection and the creation of the included map. Finally, comments and feedback from the anonymous reviewers of this article aided immensely in its evolution – they reviewed this piece with extraordinary intellectual generosity and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Much debate exists over defining the Belt and Road Initiative. It is most commonly referred to as a ‘grand strategy’ initiated by Chinese President Xi JinPing in 2013 and initially focused on improving connectivity between China and the rest of the world through infrastructure development. Since then, however, an increasingly wide range of economic and development aid activity has been referred to under the umbrella of the Belt and Road discourse.

2 Laos was one of the countries of focus for media reporting on land grabs and was among the top 20 countries identified by the Land Matrix as ‘Most targeted countries according to size of total reported acquisitions’ (Anseeuw et al., 2012).

3 Pseudonyms are used for all names of companies and interlocutors in order to ensure anonymity.

4 While Chinese actors invest across multiple sectors and locations in Laos, I focus on agricultural investments. They are smaller than mining or hydropower projects in terms of capital invested but affect an extensive amount of land in aggregate and far outnumber investments in other sectors in terms of the number of actors involved. Moreover, because barriers to investment are low, the agricultural sector attracts the greatest variety of Chinese investors, making it one in which key distinctions across types of Chinese capital can be observed.

5 The association of shifting cultivation with deforestation and low yields is widely debated (Fox et al., 2009, pp. 308–309).

6 The term 桥头 (qiaotou) in Mandarin means ‘bridgehead’ but could also be roughly translated as ‘gateway’ in English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association [grant number P022A1600-64].

Notes on contributors

Juliet Lu

Juliet Lu is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management with a focus on political ecology. She worked from 2009 to 2011 at the World Agroforestry Centre in Yunnan, China and from 2012 to 2013 with the Centre for Development and Environment in Vientiane, Laos. Her most recent research examines the political economy of Chinese agribusiness companies’ investments in Laos – primarily in rubber plantations. Her broader research interests involve the impacts of China’s growing demand for raw materials on land and natural resource management in Southeast Asia, and the political economy of Chinese development cooperation initiatives.