Thinking through the everywhereness of borders: mobile borders, everyday practices, and state logics in Southwest China

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the thesis of the mobile border and the growing interest in cross-border mobilities and practices to understand how borders provide a raison d’être for the organization of everyday life for people living in China’s Southwest borderlands. Through a conversation between the literatures on cross-border mobilities, practices and livelihoods, this study moves beyond the mobile border thesis’s lopsided focus on diffused and dispersed practices that strengthen state sovereignty and border security, but instead emphasizes the kaleidoscopic everyday practices asserting and erasing borders at the same time, the plural rationalities of state governance, and grassroots actors’ agencies and skills in appropriating or transgressing borders. In sum, this study re-appropriates the mobile border thesis to argue that borders are mobile because of their permeation into the textures of everyday life. The empirical study elucidates this argument by investigating two border regions in China, Hekou, and Ruili in Yunnan Province. Specifically, it unpacks four sets of cross-border practices – cross-border socialities and kinship ties, cross-border marriage, labor mobilities, and everyday spaces of exchange – to reveal how what is possible at the everyday level is overdetermined by official territorialities, bottom-up negotiations, and the flexibility of state governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile borders
• borderlands
• cross-border mobilities
• everyday life
• nation-state
• Southwest China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This argument, of course, are not applicable to all state practices pertaining to border management. The state may reject flexible categories of citizenship, disregard local aspirations, and create prolonged violence, as is often the case for the Myanmar side of the Sino-Myanmar border ruled by local warlords.

2. We acknowledge that there is a relatively large gap between 2016 and 2020, and over this period of time, major development projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative profoundly reshaped borderscapes in the two regions. However, they do not comprise the validity of data presented in this paper, as the latter are mainly concerned with everyday cross-border practices. As our informants have affirmed, relatively limited changes have occurred to these mundane practices during the four-year interval.

3. Regulations of Yunnan Province on the Entry and Exit of Borderland Residents at Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Laos Border Regions, URL: http://www.npcxj.com/index.php/Mobile/Lew/info/type1/difangxingfaguiguizhang/id/27450.html; Regulations of Yunnan Province on the Entry and Exit of Borderland Residents at Sino-Myanmar Border Regions, URL: http://www.xixik.com/content/d68c61de60374b96.

4. Miao people are called Hmong in Vietnam, and Dai people are called Shan in Myanmar.

5. Refer to: http://www.gov.cn/banshi/2005–05/27/content_1587.htm.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [42171240, 41871124, 41261031]