Phnom Penh Kaleidoscope: Construction Boom, Material Itineraries and Changing Scales in Urban Cambodia

Abstract

Cambodia’s urban environments have changed rapidly over the last decades, and perhaps especially over the last few years. After the 2018 election, democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change created a new context for real-estate investment, which appeared more stable than ever. As investments exploded, the already fast-paced construction business accelerated. Combining an STS focus on distributed agency with an anthropological interest in practices of worlding, this paper analyzes urban transformations in Phnom Penh (and Sihanoukville) as effects of assemblage. Setting in motion new material itineraries, patterned flows of people and things, the construction boom has been felt across the urban spectrum. Modularizing and segmenting cities and filtering populations, these itineraries have also catalyzed changing perspectives on life in the cities, on local and regional relations with “the Chinese,” and on what the future has in store for Cambodia. Interspersing street-level observations and ethnographic materials with media reports and political commentary, I show tuk-tuk drivers, journalists, businessmen, politicians and academic scholars to be simultaneously engaged in assembling the city. Their vastly different projects and practices generate different urban scales – economic, cultural, political, and ethnic – which co-exist, layer, or overlap – incongruently. The resulting image is kaleidoscopic: Phnom Penh kaleidoscope.

Keywords:

• Construction
• kaleidoscope
• material itineraries
• Phnom Penh
• scale-making

Over the last decades, Cambodia’s urban environments have changed rapidly. In Phnom Penh, new high-rise buildings have shot up everywhere, subject to little systematic urban planning. Problems of waste disposal, sewage, congestion, and air pollution grow. In just a few years, the seaside town Sihanoukville has been greatly transformed due to a huge influx of Chinese money.

The 2018 election tightened the grip of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) on national politics. Democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change, however, re-contextualized the investment environment, which appeared more stable than ever. While the presence of the EU and the US waned, Chinese investments exploded. A very visible, material outcome was intensification of the already fast-paced construction business.

Whether one turns to material, affective, or discursive registers things in Phnom Penh moved quickly, in staccato. Money rolled in. Land was bought up. Old buildings were razed and new casinos, restaurants, apartments and nightclubs opened. Fortunes were made, by some. And, as urban landscapes changed, perspectives morphed, expanded, or narrowed. While some grasped at new economic opportunities, uncertainties, rumors, and anti-Chinese sentiments spread on social media, and among urbanites, displaced workers, and evicted tenants.

Along its amorphous edges, the city expands outward. Buildings protrude into the southern marshes, and compounds grow near the airport, promoted as one among other future city centers. In already overcrowded central areas like riverside, Boeung Keng Kang 1, or Russian Market, this kind of extension is no longer possible. In these parts, construction require buying up and demolishing older houses, apartments, restaurants, or shops. Rather than additive – as at the city fringes – this is modification of already saturated urban patterns. Assembled from material itineraries and changing perspectives and happening at multiple locales, the urban scenography is complex and indeterminate.

Interspersing street-level observations, rumors, and other ethnographic materials¹ with media reports and political commentary, I show tuk-tuk drivers, journalists, businessmen, politicians and researchers to be simultaneously engaged in assembling the city. Their vastly different projects and practices generate different urban scales – economic, cultural, political, and ethnic – which co-exist, layer or overlap – incongruently. An attentiveness to urban assemblage elicits Phnom Penh as kaleidoscopic.

1 Urban Kaleidoscope: On Assemblage and Scale

The introduction to the path-breaking Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Roy and Ong 2011) sketched two dominant frameworks for analyzing Asian urban transformation and developed an alternative. While political economy depicts cities as battlegrounds over capital accumulation, postcolonial studies focus on imperial domination, subaltern agency, and the slim possibilities of resistance. Despite significant differences, both rely on an “analytics of structure” (Ong 2011: 3).

Worlding Cities argued for replacing structure with assemblages and forms of worlding. Arriving via Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour, the former are relational material and discursive composites shaped by heterogeneous elements. While some high-profile projects aim to harness “global regimes of values” (Roy 2011: 312) and others seek to implement new forms of governance, the fact that everyone else also acts means that all urban endeavors, no matter how grand, are subject to translation. Due to the surprises of assemblage, coherence is always only relative: it never quite adds up to “structure.” Asian cities were thus elicited as home to incongruent practices of worlding, some very visible and others barely perceptible, some conflicting, others quietly co-existing, or mutually irrelevant.

Similar to the worlding literature, recent ANT-inspired studies depict urban change as the outcome of contingent socio-material processes (Blok and Farías 2016a).² The latter, however, has two distinctive features that require elaboration in the present context. The first is its well-known symmetrical emphasis on distributed agency (see also Jensen 2017a), which I here deploy in the form of material itineraries. The second is an analytics of scale-making, which is only occasionally articulated (Jensen 2017b).

Distributed agency elicits the city as an enormous socio-material constellation, a meta-artifact, in and on which innumerable human and non-human agents work unceasingly, toward incongruent goals. In a formulation that vividly expresses this point, Tony Fry (2017: 35) has described the city as a “designing event”: “a continual process from its moment of conception to the everyday major and minor designed additions made to it during the course of its existence” by everybody or everything.

Rather than analyzing cities as containers within which room for play remains (to a degree), the resulting image is one of cities emerging unpredictably out of many forms of agency. Rather than imagining agency as a fixed quantity flowing through pre-established channels, actors are recognized to engage in lateral movements and “sideways agency” (Goh 2018: 308). They are making the channels, which means making urban assemblages, which means that they, always provisionally, are doing the work of worlding the city.

In turn, this provides a distinctive vantage point for dealing with the vexed question of scale. Rather than pre-given units of analysis – the micro-, inside the meso-, finally encompassed by the famous “big picture” – the macro – scale emerges as effects of material itineraries and practices of worlding. Over time, as some relations stabilize while others break, certain actors and agendas become bigger and more powerful. But in the same process others shrink and weaken. Always subject to the possibility of transformation, even rigid structures and powerful hierarchies appear as achievements requiring continuous maintenance. They can be changed, or become undone. Meanwhile, the domains or logics favored by social science also lose much of their explanatory power. As much as “the micro” and “the macro,” “the capitalist economy” and “neocolonial politics” are assemblage effects.

Adolfo Estalella and Alberto Corsín Jiménez’ (2016) analysis of the 15M movement, which began as a series of public assemblies at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square and fanned out into numerous “preoccupations” with politics, education, housing, and police racism vividly illustrates that many practices of worlding are always happening simultaneously. It is not even obvious “how many squares there are in the square,”³ as Blok and Farías (2016b: 232) observe, since Pakistani grocers, Chinese businessmen, gang members, and absent urban planners scheming from afar are also busily assembling their different versions. All these incongruent perspectives operate simultaneously as “engines of change” (Fish 1995: 189) that propel courses of action, create new material itineraries and differentially “world” what only appears to be the same square. The effect is kaleidoscopic.⁴

The introduction to Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (Bunnell and Goh 2018) noted that the future seems to have moved (Bunnell 2018: 9). In the 20^th century one looked toward Paris, London, or New York for glimpses of the future. Today, one turns to Asian cities: perhaps to Shanghai, Bangalore, or Jakarta. In contrast with these megalopolises the transformation of Cambodian cities – like Phnom Penh or Sihanoukville – barely registers outside the country. What kind of urban transformations are on the menu for them? What kinds of worldings shape them? What futures are being molded? Some insightful recent studies are available for consultation.

In an analysis of the destruction of Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak lake, Gavin Shatkin (2018: 3) describes how several intersecting “logics” – land commodification as a means of governance, real-estate investment as a strategy of capital accumulation, and rent seeking as a tactics of profit-making – conspired to get locals evicted and the lake drained to clear space for corporate real-estate development. In broad outline, the study conforms to Tim Bunnell’s (2018: 9) observation that south-east Asian urban cities tend to be depicted as dystopic slums and environmental disasters in the making. As the Boeung Kak area lost its water-absorbing capacities, the floods of already vulnerable Phnom Penh worsened. The anthropologist Sylvia Nam (2017a, 2017b) has also paid close attention to Phnom Penh’s real estate development. She characterized “speculation” enabled by foreign money as a pervasive modality of urban transformation. As space is modularized and people segregated, the urban effects are simultaneously verticalizing (buildings now shoot up) and “splintering” (Graham and Marvin 2001).

How do these studies align with an analytics of assemblage, distributed agency, and scale-making? Their empirically nuanced depictions of Phnom Penh’s real-estate development can hardly be reduced to a one-sided story of “capital accumulation.” Still, as both Shatkin and Nam emphasize speculation and the actors involved in it – wealthy businessmen and party patrons – other practices of worlding unavoidably recede to the background. The result is akin to looking through a kaleidoscope that, unable to fully rotate, can produce only a limited set of patterns. My point, however, is not a facile dismissal of these important analyses. Instead, I want to consider the implications of taking them as part of the kaleidoscope.

For anthropologists it is both methodological requirement and ethical prescription to locate themselves among others, as part of the field. Considered in terms of assemblage and distributed agency, this insistence gains a conceptual and ontological dimension. If researchers are situated within the assemblages they seek to understand, they also contribute to “worlding” them. In the case of the Cambodian construction boom, they become participants in unfolding contests and dramas about urban scales. And this has implications for how they should be treated conceptually. Rather than viewing alternative accounts as more or less adequate representations of Phnom Penh’s transformations, they must be activated alongside all the other actors and practices that assemble the shifting patterns of the urban kaleidoscope.

On the one hand, the varied perspectives of everyone – entrepreneurs, street vendors, diplomats, and social scientists – result from experiences with already existing assemblages. It is such “pre-existing connections [that] offer possibilities for thinking about new ones” (Strathern 1999: 13). Faced with the construction boom, social scientists have zoomed in on capital accumulation or inter-Asian comparisons. Journalists have highlighted China’s reemergence as an imperial or neo-colonial power. But as we will see, Cambodians have also had occasion to change perspectives, not only about their own situations and livelihood possibilities, but also about intercultural relations with Chinese investors and workers, about transnational politics, and about the future of Cambodia.⁵ Meanwhile, as new horizons of understanding emerged from material itineraries of construction and contributed, reciprocally, to shaping other itineraries in turn (see also Eitel, this issue).

In order to elicit Phnom Penh kaleidoscope, the following sections move sideways through a range of situations and practices of worlding – from street level interactions to historical snapshots and political commentary, and from the experiences of privileged foreign workers to social media expressions of outrage.⁶ Given the unavoidability of being part of the urban assemblage under description, initial position becomes that much more important. In the next section, I continue to locate myself within the “already occupied,” and indeed overcrowded, terrain of Phnom Penh.

2 Construction Boom

“Any study in this field is already participatory … ” (Strathern 1999b: 206)

I came to Cambodia in 2012.⁷ That year, an analysis of plans for Phnom Penh’s urban future characterized construction as sluggish: stalled by the global financial crisis, scandals in contracting companies, donor opposition, protests, and a lack of buyers (Paling 2012: 13). As it happened, the situation was just about to change. Shortly after, buildings seemed to sprout up absolutely everywhere (Jensen 2017a; Nam 2017a). Until very recently, when the COVID-19 virus left city streets much quieter, inhabitants endured years of near omnipresent noise pollution as drills, cranes, power tools, and more primitive implements were put to work from early morning to evening. Day in and day out, clouds of dust rise from building sites, mixing with exhaust fumes from continuously running machines. The intensity of construction is one reason – not the only one to be sure – for Phnom Penh’s rising air pollution.

As urban developers from abroad examined Cambodia, they located golden speculative potentials in pockets of Cambodian regulatory “opacity” (Paling 2012: 7) and “flexibility” (Nam 2017b: 655; Simone 2008). Centralized and opaque forms of political power disable public scrutiny of decisions (Jensen 2019c), while porous relations between politics and business enable well-positioned individuals to enrich themselves through what has been described as “state-facilitated land development” (Shatkin 2018: 25). At the same time, on account of “administrative dysfunction” (Paling 2012: 2), the state’s ability to integrate these processes in a “broader urban vision is highly limited.” We are thus witness to a series of complex, intersecting processes. On the one hand, the emergence of a partial harmony of interests between developers and state agents, in which speculative construction appears mutually beneficial. On the other hand, a series of chaotic – competing or partly overlapping – legislative or regulatory reforms at various stages of completion and implementation, which continuously shape fresh pockets of speculative possibility.

At a remove from regulations and policies, building contracts and permissions are subject to other kinds of inspection and negotiation. Depending on whether fees are paid at regular or increased price, the processing time of permits varies significantly. Builders in a hurry, or perhaps preferring to avoid too detailed scrutiny of their plans, pay more. Others wait it out.

At street level, a similar pattern gains different material inflection. Once per week, police officers stop by, casually surveying workers and equipment. Something will likely be the matter. Perhaps protective gear formally required but never used will be found missing. Perhaps a violation of an obscure building code nobody has ever heard about will be noticed. Or, perhaps the technical requirements of some equipment are slightly askew. Unfortunately, the officer will have to seal the construction site until these irregularities are taken care of. Or, the manager can choose to settle the problem right now and continue work? Cash ready at hand, the manager makes his choice and moves on.

Evidently construction has remained worth the costs – and extras – despite real estate and land prices having gone through the roof. Still, given the incredible amount of similar looking high-rise buildings that have spread across the inner city, and the spread of generic (Nielsen and Simone 2016) gated communities at the edges, it is difficult not to envisage an investment bubble about to burst (and it is not impossible that COVID-19 turned out to have been the needle).

In any case, the omnipresence of colossal new, generally ugly, buildings, 30 or 50 floors high, is somewhat perplexing. Analyzed by Sylvia Nam (2017a: 628) as a consequence of financial speculation, enabled by a mixture of missing price regulation and building codes, the result of this “vertical turn” is an apparent mismatch between the scale of buildings and of Phnom Penh itself. Bloated land prices have led to drastic increases in rental prices, which means that it is difficult to imagine who will live or work in them. Long after completion, many high-rise apartments look like huge, empty, husks.

I have heard various explanations for this state of affairs. One is that builders don’t care about filling the skyscrapers, since they are gambling on a continued rise in prices (see also Nam 2017b). Another hints that investment in landed property provides Chinese citizens, who buy in cash, with an opportunity to convert yuan into dollars. Yet a third suggests that it facilitates laundering of illicit money. Since financial oversight in Cambodia is notoriously lax, bad money becomes good, as if by magic, simply by dwelling in Phnom Penh condominiums for a while.

Overwhelmingly, the construction boom is perceived to be a Chinese affair though there is certainly also much investment from Malaysia, Korea, Singapore, Japan and elsewhere. But in any case, the effects are by no means exclusively Chinese. For one thing, as noted, in Phnom Penh construction is never something one only hears about. To indicate the particular way in which this study is itself “already participatory,” I present a sketch of personal experiences with construction since 2012.

3 A Terrain Already Occupied

“ … occupies a space in a terrain already occupied” (Strathern 1999b: 206)

Shortly after we moved into the small apartment complex “Lush Garden,” located on a quiet street in the Boeung Keng Kang 1 area, a developer bought the land just across the street. After a period of dormancy, the foundation of the old house was removed with heavy equipment. Deafening noise from early in the morning made it impossible to either sleep or work. Then, the land right behind the apartment was also sold. Soon after, construction workers peered through the second-floor bedroom. Perhaps it was time to move on.

Our new place was a 7^th floor apartment in a brand new and quite fancy-looking building, “Gardenia Flowers.” Family of the Chinese owners⁸ occupied the penthouse apartment; one high-flying nephew parked his Lamborghini at the ground floor garage. After an eventless half-year, a fire broke out one evening, quickly spreading from the 12^th to the 15^th floor. Although the alarm failed to go off, the building was successfully evacuated. Thankfully, there were only material damages, though rumors had it that one top-floor occupant had stubbornly refused to let in firefighters. The barely veiled implication was that the apartment stashed some kind of illegal goods.

Following the emergency, we took fresh interest in the fact that the building had no fire exit. The electric wiring which had caught fire hung unprotected in a shaft between the building’s single elevator and staircase. Management promised that this unfortunate state of affairs would be fixed within a few weeks, but a good friend working in construction told us the problems were structural and basically not solvable. So, we moved again. As it happened, it hardly mattered, since all non-Chinese tenants were evicted later in the year.

Wary of new high-rise buildings, we moved to the esteemed “Diplomat’s Corner,” a group of three-story buildings surrounding a spacious garden. Built in the mid-90s, this had been the first apartment complex in Phnom Penh that catered specifically to foreigners. However, history seemed bent on repetition. After a few months, the neighboring ground was sold to a Chinese company, which promptly started drilling. Somewhat desperate, we moved to the other side of the compound and enjoyed some months of relative tranquility. Alas, half a year later the whole compound was bought by undisclosed (Chinese) owners. We were informed that eviction could be expected within a few months.

Shortly after moving again, we noticed with considerable dismay that the adjacent area was being vacated. A check confirmed that it had been bought up by “the Chinese.”⁹ Workers and tractors arrived, and demolition commenced yet again. A new building is under construction. I am listening at this moment, while trying to concentrate … Thankfully, this appears to be only a two-story restaurant (two years later, as I conclude in the final edits, the noise is back, as the empty restaurant is being demolished).

This bit of description allows me to make three related points. First, while the transformation of urban space is certainly a matter of economics and politics, and is mainly treated as such in newspapers and the social scientific literature, it is also a massively material process. In Phnom Penh, it involves tractors, cranes, dust, hammers, cement, not to mention nonstop noise pollution, which is basically unavoidable anywhere in the city. Second, Strathern’s quip that any case is “already participatory,” that it occurs in a “terrain already occupied,” is – in this case – quite concrete. In some sense, her formulation recapitulates the by-now standard critique of the idea of a “god’s eye view,” but it gains experiential texture with reference to the present case, which I “travel within” (Morita 2016), simultaneously studying and inhabiting it.

Even if my experiences are both specific and very privileged, the sense of uncertainty I have tried to convey is not, and this is the third point. Whatever inconvenience well-off foreigners living in Phnom Penh might suffer from construction is dwarfed by the precarity of many Cambodians driven out of their own city by rising costs while luxury condos proliferate (Shatkin 2018; Simone 2010). The manifest unfairness is one major reason increasing numbers, as we shall see, have changed their opinion about “the Chinese.” Their perspectives have been shaped by new material itineraries, and the activity trails of construction.¹⁰ Like Mongolian roads, which distance locals from Chinese workers despite materially connecting them (Pedersen and Bunkenborg 2012), Cambodian buildings and compounds also create new divisions and partitions.

The transformation of city space simultaneously enables new projects, dreams and aspirations and engenders new anxieties, fears, and forms of critique. Hence, it becomes necessary to weave together analysis of material itineraries and assemblage with peoples’ changing perspectives. Some changes may appear “small” (an apartment bought, the evicted family angry) and others large “large” (infrastructure projects initiated, international relations reconfigured). Yet not only do diverse actors and practices attribute different importance to these events, so that there is no agreement on their relative scale. They also act in ways that try to redefine the scales, for example by making the scandals of eviction sufficiently “big” to merit action or by rendering environmental damage so “small” as to be negligible and require none. This means that the situation cannot be adequately captured by conventional notions of scalar hierarchy or encompassment (Jensen 2007). The point, rather, is to understand how changing scalar configurations emerge from the interplay of material itineraries and horizons of understanding, to varied, kaleidoscopic effect.

The next section pursues that point by lingering on the anxieties of foreign workers, whose privileged lives were unexpectedly affected by Chinese construction. Offering a preliminary illustration of material and perspectival transformation going hand in hand, it also paves the way for later, radically different, depictions of what is at stake in Cambodian urban change.

4 Building Rumors

The late summer and autumn of 2013 was a period of high tension. In the July election, the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP) had claimed a historically narrow (and, to many, dubious) victory over the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). As protesters gathered nightly in “Freedom Park,” police and military presence on the streets dramatically increased. After a violent crackdown that killed four people, the protests were disbanded in January 2014. Freedom Park was closed, and life returned to something resembling normal.

Four years later, as the 2018 elections were approaching, these events were still fresh in memory. It was a period of ill forebodings, the atmosphere of the city (see Sangkhamanee, this issue) tense and uncertain. What would happen if the CPP lost (again)? Was there any real chance that Hun Sen’s decades-long rule might end? What then? Would the party peacefully release its grip on power or would it respond with violence? The latter seemed more likely, since there were frequent allusions to the prospect of a new civil war. Yet, conversely, what would happen if the CCP was once again perceived to win by fraud?

As things turned out, these worrying scenarios were all preempted by a series of advance moves by the ruling party. An early warning came in 2017 when the English-language newspaper The Cambodia Daily, known for its critical journalism, was shut down after 24 years of operation,¹¹ charged with multi-million dollar tax evasion.¹² Meanwhile, social media surveillance intensified,¹³ on- and offline critics were threatened or arrested,¹⁴ and one outspoken political commentator was gunned down by unknown perpetrators.¹⁵ To top it off, the major opposition party was dissolved by the Supreme Court after having been accused of conspiring to overthrow the government.¹⁶

These maneuvers subdued the urbanites and intelligentsia that form the backbone of the political opposition. After having cleared the path, the CPP triumphantly declared victory on 29 July, and government reconvened. No drama, nothing to see here. But if democratic voices both in and outside Cambodia had been roundly demoralized, the same could not be said of foreign investors. From the point of view of business, the “stable” political environment was far preferable to previous uncertainties.¹⁷

For some time up to the election, the construction boom seemed to slow down. To be sure, skyscrapers at various stages of construction were still everywhere visible in Phnom Penh’s downtown areas, but they didn’t seem to be rising as quickly. Fewer crews were operating, and the usual banging, clanging, and drilling had subsided, at least to some degree. For a while, it seemed, the dust of construction – both metaphorical and real – was settling. As soon as the political dust of the election had settled, however, the situation changed dramatically. Building recommenced and indeed intensified, as if to make up for lost time. Record numbers of investors descended upon Phnom Penh and other cities. They appeared to buy up everything they could get hold of.

In the (non-Chinese) foreign community, rumors began to circulate: “did you hear about that lovely villa on street 57, where the French couple lived? It was sold … they are looking for some other place now,” one heard, or “at the Russian Market, they have evicted the tenants in the Mahogany building; everybody has to be out by next month.” And it was also at this time, shortly after the election, that one tenant at Diplomat’s was suddenly informed that his family’s contract would not be renewed. By late afternoon everyone in the compound had heard the news, and the implication was not difficult to grasp. A meeting was called with the general manager, who, after some evasion and claims to ignorance, confirmed that everyone would indeed be evicted “sooner or later.”

A group of tenants – Japanese, European, Australian, and Latin American, working for various development organizations and international corporations – met to discuss what to do. In a conversation that kept circling back to recent stories everyone had heard about the evictions of friends or acquaintances, it was agreed that a collective response was preferable. If we all stood together, it might be possible to at least postpone the eviction, creating a window of opportunity for finding decent new accommodations. Perhaps some kind of compensation for breach of contract might be negotiated?

Only a few days later, the Australian who had pushed for collectivity casually mentioned that he had found a new apartment and would be moving shortly. After that, it was each person, or family, on its own. A flurry of meetings with apartment and compound managers – during early mornings, lunch breaks, evenings and weekends – ensued, as everybody tried to get better deals than their friends and colleagues, suddenly redefined as competitors in a scarce and uncertain market.

These meetings centered on the usual questions – price, size, amenities, location, and so on – all tempered by a degree of desperation. However, a rather different question also rose to prominence: “Can you promise that this building is not going to be sold to the Chinese?” Among this liberal and cosmopolitan group of people, replies that would normally be considered unseemly – “The owner is a Khmer. He hates the Chinese and will never sell to them” or “We don’t even rent apartments to the Chinese” – were met with relief. With luck, a few havens might still offer protection against the onslaught …

5 “Your Chinese Future”

A series of contingent events – election crackdown, business opportunities, withdrawal of Western money, influx of Chinese investments – all conspired to connect elements that usually do not relate – the Phnom Penh ex-pat community, Chinese real estate investment and construction practices, and even “the Chinese” as such. In the grand scheme of things, this constellation is obviously both highly specific and quite insignificant. In some ways, however, the situation seemed to resonate with broader concerns.

Consider the 7 December 2018 issue of the Washington, D.C. based news-magazine Foreign Policy. While evicted tenants from Diplomat’s near the Independence Monument frantically searched for new places to live, the Portuguese politician Bruno Maçães, senior fellow at the conservative American think-tank The Hudson Institute, published “A Preview of Your Chinese Future.”¹⁸

The year is 2049, and the massive “Belt and Road initiative has finished.”¹⁹ A bridge crossing the Caspian sea has sped up trade between Asia and Europe. A canal in Thailand connects the Pacific and Indian Oceans and high-speed railways crisscross the African continent. These dramatic infrastructural transformations have been accompanied by socio-political change. Going far beyond the narrowly instrumental and legalistic Western political imagination, the new Chinese world order emphasizes forms of “togetherness,” characterized by “dependence, generosity, gratitude, respect,” but also possibilities of retribution.

Return to the present. In May 2019, Xi Jinping met King Norodom Sihamoni with a view to developing “an action plan for building a community with a shared future for China and Cambodia.”²⁰ It would appear that the groundwork for new forms of Chinese “togetherness” are being laid.

The implications are evaluated quite differently. For Bruno Maçães, Chinese politics entails a “decisive” move away from “enlightenment ideals of transparency and public knowledge,” already evident in the opaque plans for the belt and road initiative, which, like “holy writ,” are never revealed completely. In Beijing, according to Maçães, one hears that the party has as much right to privacy as individuals … Confronted with his mixture of prophecy, stern warnings and ominous rumors, it is tempting to dismiss the “preview” out of hand. Still, if one reads symptomatically, it looks more like an amplified version of relatively widespread, and apparently growing, worries about China’s global influence. Such concerns are certainly also very keenly felt in Cambodia.

In September 2018, the news agency Bloomberg featured a “bird’s eye view” of the construction boom. Since Xi Jinping promised to take the belt and road initiative to Cambodia, Phnom Penh has undergone “one of the world’s fastest property booms.” Previously renowned for its French provincial style and the “New Khmer architecture” introduced by Vann Molyvann, the city is rapidly “becoming unrecognizable.”²¹ Meanwhile, Sihanoukville, until recently a laid-back resort town catering to Western backpackers and Cambodian holidaymakers, has morphed into a “New Macau:”

Chinese investors are building casinos there on a massive scale … The Cambodian government is happy to accept the money. And Beijing never asks difficult questions … There is clearly no urban planning here. It seems the builders got carte blanche to satisfy the hunger for gambling²²

Similar to much international reportage, these events are analyzed as a form of Chinese neo-colonialization, in which massive infrastructural investments operate as a Trojan horse for economic and military interests and the remaking of cities to the tastes of Chinese workers and tourists is collateral damage. The situation certainly contrasts starkly with depictions of Chinese development in Africa as a novel form of high-precision, non-disruptive “surgical colonialism” (Bergesen 2013, cf. Mohan 2013).

Not surprisingly, the Cambodian government vigorously rejects the notion that the country may end up as nothing more than a vassal of China, hosting casinos and brothels. Officials have recently encouraged journalists to praise Sihanoukville as a “city of miracles” – perhaps the next Silicon Valley!²³ – and prime minister Hun Sen has bragged that Cambodia doesn’t even have a Chinatown.²⁴ Given that Sihanoukville is broadly perceived as nothing but a Chinatown, this rang rather hollow. More balanced political commentators pointed to the need for alleviating rising tensions between Cambodians and the Chinese.

Yet, if we step back from the surface disagreements it is possible to discern some surprising similarities. For one, consider the prevalent trope of historical rupture. At the global level, Maçães invokes an altogether new Chinese future. Hun Sen speaks of unprecedented possibilities for economic prosperity. The Bloomberg feature contrasts the charms of 1960s Phnom Penh with its present deterioration. Everyone highlights temporal discontinuity, and agrees that the agent of change is external, Chinese.²⁵ There seems also to be more or less unanimous agreement that these changes are best analyzed in terms of macro-politics and economics. This is perhaps understandable. Dramatic changes are, after all, everywhere visible, China plainly plays a big role, and it would be naïve to disregard either money or might. Nevertheless, images of rupture cleanly accomplished through economics or politics render invisible the unruliness of assemblage; the surprises that happen as incongruent forms of worlding meet and mesh.

Rather than a single disruption brought about by the Chinese, we are looking at multiple simultaneous transformations – material and perspectival – messily wrought by innumerable heterogeneous agents over shorter and longer periods of time. To grasp the relation between material itineraries of construction and the emergent qualities of Chineseness,” the next section moves from questions of geo-politics and “our Chinese future” to sketches of Cambodian history.

6 The Emergent Qualities of Chineseness

These days, China is everywhere in Cambodia. In international and local news, in the dust and noise of rising buildings, and in the changing perspectives of people affected by the material itineraries of construction. Given all the talk of drastic change, one might be excused for believing their arrival is recent. That is very far from the case (e.g. Siphat 2017; Verver 2012). The Chinese have long been internal to Cambodia, their emergent qualities there complexly interwoven with historically changing external configurations.²⁶

When the French colonized Indochina, they found Chinese communities in all major Cambodian towns (Wilmott 1969: 283). During this period, the significant economic power of Chinese immigrant communities was slowly eroded “by increasing government intervention” (Wilmott 1969: 298). Gradually, their prominent identification with business was replaced with a more “harmless” emphasis on cultural identity (ibid.), a strategy Wilmott described as engagement in “partial politics.”

The historian Penny Edwards (2008: 61) estimated the population of Phnom Penh in 1936 to be around 100,000 people, of which more than 20,000 were ethnic Chinese. By 1963, the city had grown to 135,000 people of which upwards of 1/3 were Chinese, mainly Teochew (Wilmott 1969: 293). Organized in congregations that centered on ethnic and linguistic differences and focused on different types of industry, more than 90% were traders. Indeed, despite the attempted colonial erosion of their powers, they were hardly marginal. Between independence (1953) and the Khmer Rouge revolt, they continued to dominate commerce and exploit Khmer peasants (Wilmott 1981: 38, 42). Even so, the history of Cambodia seemed surprisingly free of “anti-Chinese incidents and … anti-Chinese sentiment” (Wilmott 1981: 40).

Five years after independence, Cambodia established formal ties with communist China. Since King Sihanouk had cut off US aid in 1963, the country had grown increasingly dependent on its northern neighbor. Aside from providing much needed monetary assistance, by 1970 China had established around 200 Chinese-language schools in the country (Marks 2000: 95). To observers, it was evident that the strategic aim of this “partial politics” was to extend influence into Southeast Asia (Marsot 1969). However, when the US-backed Lon Nol government took over in 1970, the Chinese were persecuted as communist infiltrators and destroyers of Khmer culture (Wilmott 1998).

Things got much worse. Ben Kiernan (1986) estimated that almost half of the remaining Chinese population in Cambodia was killed during the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979). After the overthrow of the murderous regime, the Sino-Khmer continued to be repressed by the Vietnamese liberators and the new government (Gottesman 2003). Writing in the early 80s, Wilmott (1981: 45) found it “safe … to assert that today no one identifies themselves as Chinese in Kampuchea.” He predicted that only drastic change, like “the return of a non-marxist, capitalist regime, would permit a Chinese community to reappear.” That, he observed, seemed like “a very remote impossibility indeed.” As late as 1988, Hun Sen described China as the “root of all that is evil in this country” with reference to the country’s continuous support of the Khmer Rouge between 1979 and 1991 (see also Mertha 2014).

As the situation gained a modicum of stability after Khmer Rouge, it became a political priority to open the country to international trade. And as more cordial relations with China were pursued, Sino-Khmer merchant families were once again ready to take advantage. The American security analyst Paul Marks (2000: 95) observed that it was probably “more than coincidence” that the first Chinese language school to open after the war was located in Kampong Cham, an area governed by Hun Sen’s brother, which also happened to be inhabited by many Cambodians of Chinese origin. In 1993, Phnom Penh got its first Chinese newspaper, owned by a real-estate magnet (Nyíri 2012: 108). A few years later, Hun Sen traveled to Beijing to formally bury the hatchet and sign a trade agreement.²⁷ Business relations have steadily improved (e.g. Gilley 1999; Slocomb 2010).

Today, commerce is again a significantly ethnic Chinese affair. The richest and most powerful oknhas²⁸ are Sino-Khmer of Teochew origin. Meanwhile, massive investments led to dramatic changes in the perception of new Chinese arrivals. Migrants from mainland China, who only a few decades ago were viewed with suspicion, came to be viewed as having “desirable attributes” (Nyíri 2012: 95) including “entrepreneurial acumen” and “cultural and linguistic skills” (ibid.). In this aspect, according to Pál Nyíri, they join hands with Cambodia’s ethnic Chinese, who have similarly come to be “celebrated as conduits of economic and political ties between two friendly nations” (105). As Hun Sen has become the face of the impossible-to-imagine non-Marxist regime that would embrace everything Chinese, the volte face seems almost complete. But not quite.

As the reader may have noticed there is a sharp discrepancy between Nyíri’s (2012) depiction of the quite recent emergence of positive views of entrepreneurial Chinese migrants and the even more recent anti-Chinese sentiments I have evoked. As I discuss in the next section, there is an intimate relation between the material redesign of Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville and the newest round of changing perceptions of “the Chinese.” As much as the cities themselves, scales of economics, culture, politics and ethnicity are under construction.

7 Designs on the City

Not much time has passed since Nyíri (2012) observed that Chinese migrants were welcomed rather than treated with suspicion. This was 2012, the year of my arrival in Phnom Penh, and of Paling’s (2012) characterization of the urban construction landscape as sluggish. Shortly after, Chinese investors began buying up land and buildings hand over fist.

As people were evicted and machines moved in, demolition left scars across the urban landscape. Then construction took off in earnest. After the 2018 election, growing demands led to shortages of workers and materials, both of which were imported from the north. In short order, Chinese hostels and restaurants opened by the hundreds. Working long, hot days, the ever-expanding group of single males sought entertainment at night. Chinese presence further materialized as bars, karaoke parlors, and clubs catering specifically to the newcomers.

As usual, Phnom Penh is crowded with motos and tuk-tuks. But at street-level the atmosphere seems changed (see also Sangkhamanee, this issue). Over the last few years, cheaper app-based services like Grab and PassApp have driven down the number of tuk-tuk drivers calling out from every corner. There is little love lost between the old hands and their usually younger competitors. Still, many share a dislike for the new Chinese workers, who, traveling in groups, drive hard bargains and sometimes refuse to pay. Anyway, tuk-tuk drivers complain, they prefer riding together in big cars. Income opportunities are decreasing.

Noise pollution is increasing. Central Phnom Penh is heavily congested and traffic basically unregulated, notwithstanding the recent sporadic installation of traffic lights, which pedestrians trust at their peril. Traveling along the central arteries of the city during daytime means being fried by heat, choked by exhaust fumes, and blasted by Khmer pop and advertisements for mobile phones and accessories from shops and stalls. In 2019, half-finished buildings covered in green scaffolding were still visible wherever one looked.

The center of Phnom Penh appears saturated. Most older buildings and smaller plots of land are long gone, except in certain downtown areas where the prices remain too steep even for investors willing to take big risks. Koh Pich (“Diamond Island”), until recently home to impoverished gardeners, has become an enclave of serviced apartments and restaurants. Not long ago, there was no conceivable measure between people planting vegetables there and distant real-estate moguls. Now there is: their incongruent projects and material itineraries intersect at the small plots of land, swiftly obtained and cleared out to make space for another apartment complex. Even so, the condos do not appeal to most Cambodians, and especially not at exorbitant prices. Similar to other newly developed areas, Koh Pich seems hardly inhabited, a ghost town at night.

As dilapidated older houses are bought up, working class families and squatter communities are pushed further and further away from the city centers (Shatkin 2018: 1ff; Simone 2010: 34ff). Worsening traffic conditions and lack of money means that they are unable to maintain jobs downtown. Meanwhile, quite a few Cambodians have become wealthy from selling land. Everybody knows someone who made a killing by parting with property or land on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, or in Sihanoukville, Battambang, or Kampot. By 2019, land worth 2000$ five or ten years ago could be sold for four or six times the price. For many who lack bright economic prospects, the real estate bonanza has been very tempting.

After years of precarious work in factories, restaurants, and bars, one young woman – Thavy – is weighing her options. She decides to use her savings, a few thousand dollars, as partial payment for a plot of land close to the airport. Betting on further price increases, she hopes to sell it in a few years for a higher price, or perhaps rent it out. In the meanwhile, she will have to pay off the outstanding sum on a monthly basis.

A friend of mine, soon to get married and worried about economic security, asks for investment advice. He has been thinking about investing in international stock but the markets seem opaque and risky. Recently, his cousin sold a small plot of land in Kep at a huge gain. Now he is considering whether to pool money with friends to buy some land in the province. Do I think it is a good idea? Would I perhaps be interested in partnering?

New issues and uncertainties emerge almost instantly. The full price of Thavy’s parcel of land is almost 16,000$, and she is quickly realizing that she won’t be able to pay 450$ per month to the holder of “her” title. Instead, she now has to find a way to renege on the deal; an expensive affair requiring more documents, bribes, and rubberstamps. In the end, she will have almost nothing left. Meanwhile, my friend, the potential investor, is painfully aware that land prices are already very inflated. Equally worried about risking his meager savings and missing out once again, he confides that he has trouble sleeping. Luckily, by the time the real estate frenzy finally seemed to slow down (on account of the stagnating Chinese economy), he had still not decided. As the corona outbreak brought construction to a complete halt, a Japanese acquaintance convinced him to take his chances with African cryptocurrency.

Whether one turns to factory workers trying to escape, evicted tenants, urban gardeners or hotel owners, one comes across dreams and nightmares for the future complexly interwoven with the material itineraries of construction. New perspectives on urban life, its possibilities and dangers, are spun out of these itineraries. They are changing the scales of the city.

225 kilometers southwest, Sihanoukville has been greatly transformed in the span of a few years. A sleepy tourist destination as late as 2015, by 2018 the city had turned into the major Cambodian hub for the belt and road initiative. As one approaches the water front, the changes are clearly visible. Signage on guesthouses, restaurants and minimarts is almost exclusively in Chinese. At the heart of the city, a steep road runs from the Golden Lions roundabout down to the ferry terminal, where boats depart for the nearby islands. A few years ago, this was a scene of back-packers, diving shacks, and a mix of cheap Western and Cambodian restaurants. Now it is one of dust, green scaffolding, building noise, construction crews, and Chinese hotels. Casinos with gaudy, golden signs are everywhere.

I walk the streets behind the beachfront, searching for a nice little Japanese restaurant I’ve visited before, and a small hostel where I previously stayed. Both are gone. Rather than gaining perspective, I feel disoriented, hardly able to recognize anything at all. Vast areas have been cleared. The central shopping mall is torn down, and the lively, sleazy entertainment area nearby has turned into an enormous hole in the ground, half-hidden behind a fence. The whole place looks like a Phnom Penh building scene surreally sped up and badly gone wrong.

I walk down to the water. From the pier, crowded, noisy Ochheuteal beach stretches east, packed with cheap travelers, peddlers, bars, and inescapable reggae music. Except, today only a few women are walking there, imploring me to buy a coconut and a plastic bracelet. It is not even quiet but … completely deserted. Toward Otres beach in the distance, I can see some parasols and a few people. Along the way, pipes pump raw sewage into the ocean.

At my brightly colored, cheerful looking hotel, warnings in English and Chinese grace doors, walls, and furniture. “You are not allowed to sleep overnight on this sofa.” “If you eat food in the room you will pay 50$.” “Please, do not scream loudly.” I remark that I can’t promise not to scream, but I will try my best. Shaking her head, the receptionist replies: “It is not for you. It is for the Chinese.” Unprompted she continues, “The city is lost, there is nothing left.”

In contrast with Phnom Penh, where the construction boom, dramatic and uneven as its effects clearly are, generates quite a variety of projects and viewpoints, perspectives on Sihanoukville’s complete make-over have been more unanimously negative. As images of the destroyed city center, roaming gangs, gambling and prostitution, not to forget environmental destruction, spread across social media, the receptionist’s bleak conclusion that “the city is lost” came to be widely shared.

We are now in a position to understand the inverse relation between positive attitudes to “the Chinese” and “sluggish” real-estate development in 2012, and the far more skeptical sentiments emerging only a few years after. Perspectives transformed in consequence of quite concrete (and widely disseminated) experiences with the practices of (un-)worlding that have so dramatically transformed the cities. While macro-political relations reached new levels of chumminess, Sihanoukville morphed into a material symbol suggesting to many Cambodians that their “Chinese future” might turn out rather bleak.

8 Conclusion

Traveling within the case, this paper has elicited Cambodian urban transformations as effects of assemblage. Setting in motion new material itineraries, patterned flows of people and things, the construction boom has been felt across the urban spectrum. Modularizing and segmenting cities and filtering populations, these itineraries have affected urban practices of worlding in dramatically different ways. They have catalyzed changing perspectives on life in the cities, on local and regional relations with “the Chinese,” and on what the future has in store for Cambodia. The resulting image of Phnom Penh (and Sihanoukville) as assembled from multiple incongruent, yet partly overlapping, practices and scale-making projects is kaleidoscopic.

The kaleidoscope offers a multi-layered, material objection to analyses that assume scales to be pre-given and analytical domains (economy, politics, culture) clearly differentiated. Subject to the vagaries of assemblage and distributed agency, the city conforms to none of these logics but elicits both domains and scales as contingent effects of urban assemblage.

The perspectives people hold on changing urban situations are neither individual or intersubjective, nor overdetermined by structure. They are inter-objectively (Latour 1996) assembled from particular experiences and relations with material itineraries. When Thavy arrived in Phnom Penh from the province as a teenager, her unappealing options were both clear and distinct: back-breaking labor in the special economic zone, somehow getting by with a small market stall, or nightwork as a karaoke hostess. Ten years later, the building boom has dramatically changed the situation. As the political elite turned to China – and Chinese entrepreneurs to Cambodia – Phnom Penh seemed to change week by week, and land prices kept rising. Thavy gained new perspective and began envisioning new courses of possible action. With a bit of investment savvy, there might be a way out of precarity. Others considered the benefits of sending their sons to Chinese school, or taking a job as a croupier at one of the new casinos. Some, of course, had little concrete interaction with Chinese people but much with the material itineraries of construction. Meanwhile many others engaged with a broad range of Asian and European or African business partners: all parts of the urban kaleidoscope overshadowed – on the streets and also in this text – by “the Chinese.”

Keeping their eyes firmly focused on the “upscale,” entrepreneurs pushed for the proliferation of gated communities, serviced apartments, and expensive office spaces. As Phnom Penh’s poorest inhabitants end up in increasing, largely ignored, numbers on the outskirts, the center caters to the rich, or their ghost avatars. Here we see the material itineraries of construction changing urban scales in multiple ways and dimensions. For Thavy, they redefined the scales of economic opportunity (“how can I make a living?”). For others, they opened new questions about cultural relations (“who are these new Chinese, and can they be trusted?”), transnational politics (“what does this mean for the future of Cambodia?”) and, of course, about the forms and atmospheres of the city itself.

Reciprocally, horizons of understanding also operate as motors of imagination, engines of change. They bootstrap action and assemble future material itineraries. Thus, the intensification of the building boom was facilitated by a carefully groomed perspectival switch, according to which Cambodia, finally, was “politically stable.” Soon after, the material itineraries of construction began to radically reconfigure Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. After gaining new perspective on the cities in which they live through encounter with these transformations, Thavy and many others set out to create their own itineraries: as we have seen, with more or less success.

By 2018, a hundred casinos built at lightning speed had converted Sihanoukville into “New Macau.” At the far side of what has been described as Chinese “surgical colonialism” (Bergesen 2013), so precise that it barely registers, surgery on Sihanoukville was conducted not with a scalpel but with a shovel. Despite damage control from the Chinese embassy and the Cambodian government, widely circulating social media images of sewage pumped into crystal clear water at the beaches, threatening gangs, and dispossessed locals, turned the city into a larger-than-life urban warning sign of what a Chinese future might hold in store. Migrants from the Chinese mainland, who had seen their former dubious associations replaced with more sophisticated attributes only a few years ago, were once again frowned upon. In June 2019, after a building collapse killed 28 people, public outrage led to promises of a crackdown on illegal construction and unlicensed gambling. Shortly after, news reported an exodus of Chinese workers and tourists, and plummeting land prices. Then came COVID-19. At the moment, Sihanoukville is almost as deserted as Koh Pich Island at night. Few people claim to have a very clear perspective on what comes next. Still, they all have one.

Much of the time, urban transformation happens slowly, under the radar. It often takes the form of silent transformations; the extension of sewage pipes, the installation of new street lights, or the eventual, delayed, yet somehow expected, demolition of decrepit buildings. Few pay much attention on a regular basis. Horizons of understanding, too, often go unnoticed, depending, as they do, on “the dark background of a network that cannot be seen” (Fish 1995: 237). What is so fascinating about the current Cambodian situation is that material itineraries have temporarily ceased being silent. As buildings, fences and walls appear too quickly everywhere, the normally dark background of urban assemblage has turned into the plainly visible foreground. Drawing everybody’s attention, at least for the time being, this suddenly brightly illuminated foreground catalyzes new perspectives and scale-making projects. Together and against each other they design the city: Phnom Penh kaleidoscope.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casper Bruun Jensen

Casper Bruun Jensen is an anthropologist of science and technology currently residing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik) (2013) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity (with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita) (2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies.

Notes

¹ These distinctions are slippery, however, in the context of construction and investment. Since few people have access to much definite information about the opaque flows that affect them, almost everything has a dimension of hearsay and gossip.

² This is no surprise given the shared inspiration from Gilles Deleuze (see Jensen 2019a). Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (Latour 2005) was published a few years prior to Worlding Cities (Roy and Ong 2011) and is cited in the introduction (Ong 2011: 12). Conversely, the editors of the ANT-inspired Urban Cosmopolitics (Farías and Blok 2016: 12) acknowledge sharing “similar topological questions and concerns” with Worlding Cities.

³ As analyzed by Brown (2019), China Miéville’s (2009) novel The City and the City is in part a magnificent exploration of the possible “diplomatic” implications of more than one city being located in the “same” location.

⁴ A kaleidoscope, if you recall, is a tube that allows you to look inside. As it is rotated, one sees continuously changing patterns of color and light. On the interior, there is no fixed scale.

⁵ Compared with the varied orientations of Asian cities to one another discussed in Roy and Ong (2011), much of the following concerns mainland Chinese investments in Cambodia. This is not because the Chinese influence is altogether hegemonic or completely determining. Certainly, many project activities relating to many Asian countries are going on. It is contingently the case, however, that the Chinese presence has been rather overwhelming for several years. Visible on the streets, spontaneously commented upon by a wide variety of people, appearing regularly in the news, etc. With a view to exhibiting the entwinement and mutual modification of people’s perspectives and the material itineraries of construction, the paper thus aims to textually recapitulate how “the Chinese” (as perspectival effects, see note 9 for further discussion) presently overshadow much else that is going on in the urban kaleidoscope.

⁶ The kaleidoscopic entry point entails that all of the following descriptions, even those that may seem “omniscient” in tone, are inherently perspectival and situated. They describe something as really “like this” from that particular perspective and location within the field.

⁷ I arrived in Phnom Penh in 2012, and have lived there ever since. Originally, I did fieldwork on issues relating to infrastructure (Jensen 2017a, 2019b) and knowledge practices in development (Jensen 2019c, 2019d, 2020) but over time my interests drifted and expanded. As the building boom intensified in 2018, I began to focus specifically on the material itineraries of construction and their co-emergence with new perspectives on various things urban. The data for this article can be described as a “methods assemblage” (Law 2004) comprised of numerous “materials,” formally and informally collected, observed, heard, and smelled, across many urban contexts over the last eight years.

⁸ Foreigners are formally allowed to own so-called “strata-titled” properties like condos, but not land. This can be circumvented by partnering with Cambodian companies in a 49/51% ownership structure that facilitates de facto control via various contractual provisions. Other possibilities include making leasehold agreements for 15 to 50 years, or acquiring Cambodian citizenship through payment.

⁹ Rather than indexing a dubious notion of race, “the Chinese” as evoked here – and in line with the kaleidoscopic emphasis on the mutual shaping of material itineraries and varied perspectives – designates a set of historically emerging and still changing qualities adopted by some people and ascribed to some by others. As I indicate further on, these qualities change quite radically over time and depending on context. This demands emphasis because many of my informants, as we will see, are quick to use “the Chinese” as a disparaging denomination whenever a problem with construction occurs. Though sometimes troubling in substance, these depictions are testimony to ways in which the material itineraries of construction shape new perspectives and thus reshuffle the kaleidoscope. Obviously, addition of the perspectives of Chinese entrepreneurs, construction engineers, or workers would have calibrated the description differently. They are missing, not on account of irrelevance (to the contrary they would be highly relevant) but rather due to practical difficulties – real estate buyers not interested in making themselves known and the famous opacity of the construction business – as well as due to my own language deficiencies. Opacity, however, also helps to drive the proliferation of perspectives. It operates as a motor for the imagination, an engine of change that, at this moment, facilitates Khmer talk about “the Chinese” as a generic and abstract category.

¹⁰ E.g. Paul Millar. 13 November 2018. “Seeing red: ‘Cambodia doesn’t have anti-China nationalism – yet’,” Southeast Asia Globe. Accessed 15 April 2019. http://sea-globe.com/anti-chinese-sentiment-in-cambodia and extended discussion further in the paper. See Delaplace (2012) for a discussion of Mongolian perspectives on Chinese “parasitism.”

¹¹ Illustrative of other significant Asian itineraries and reference points in Cambodia (in line with Roy and Ong 2011), the other English newspaper Phnom Penh Post was sold in 2018 to a Malaysian businessman with close ties to the government.

¹² The prime minister referred to the newspaper as the country’s “chief thief,” and threatened the owner with prison. See Aun Chhengpor. 6 September 2016. “Shutdown of prominent Cambodia news paper fuels fears of government crackdown ahead of elections,” VoaCambodia. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.voacambodia.com/a/fearless-newspaper-closure-marks-declaration-of-post-truth-era-in-cambodia/4017429.html.

¹³ Ben Pavior. 7 April 2017. “Surveillance state,” The Cambodia Daily. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.cambodiadaily.com/features/surveillance-state-127681. Around this time, a random check revealed that my own Facebook profile had accumulated dozens of Cambodian “followers” unconnected to anyone I knew.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Neou Vannarin. 11 July 2018. “Two years after assassination, Cambodians remember slain political analyst Kem Ley,” VoaCambodia. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.voacambodia.com/a/two-years-after-assassination-cambodians-remember-slain-political-analyst/4478299.html.

¹⁶ Ben Sokhean, Mech Dara and Ananth Baliga. 17 November 2017. “‘Death of democracy,’ CNRP dissolved by Supreme Court ruling,” The Phnom Penh Post. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national-post-depth-politics/death-democracy-cnrp-dissolved-supreme-court-ruling.

¹⁷ May Kunmakara. 12 September 2018. “‘Your contracts are safe,’ Hun Sen tells Chinese firms,” Khmer Times. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.khmertimeskh.com/532867/your-contracts-are-safe-hun-sen-tells-chinese-firms.

¹⁸ Bruno Maçães. 7 December 2018. “A Preview of Your Chinese Future,” Foreign Policy. Accessed 12 April 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/07/a-preview-of-your-chinese-future.

¹⁹ Initiated in 2013, the belt and road initiative is a massive, bewildering Chinese infrastructure development project, which aims to improve land and sea connections in South-east Asia, between East-Asia and Europe, and extends well into Africa.

²⁰ China Global Television Network, 14 May 2019. “Xi calls for building of China-Cambodia community of shared future. CGTV. Accessed 16 May 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414e34596a4e34457a6333566d54/index.html.

²¹ Philip Heijmans. 11 September 2018. “Chinese money is driving one of Asia’s fastest property booms,” Bloomberg. Accessed 12 April 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-10/chinese-money-is-driving-a-property-boom-in-cambodia.

²² Kris Janssens. n.d. “The Cambodian port city on China’s 21^st Century silk road that’s becoming the New Macau,” Inter Press Service. Accessed 12 April 2019. http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/09/cambodian-port-city-chinas-21st-century-silk-road-thats-becoming-new-macau.

²³ Sun Narin, Aun Chhengpor and Sokummono Khan. 15 March 2019. “Cambodia to Journalists: Let Us Now Praise Sihanoukville,” VoaCambodia. Accessed 22 April 2019. https://www.voacambodia.com/a/cambodia-to-journalists-let-us-now-praise-sihanoukville/4829091.html.

²⁴ Asian Correspondent. N.d. “China invading Cambodia? That’s a ‘crazy’ argument, says Hun Sen.” Accessed 12 April 2019. https://asiancorrespondent.com/2018/10/china-invading-cambodia-thats-a-crazy-argument-says-hun-sen.

²⁵ Nostalgia infuses the Bloomberg piece and other commentaries, as they favorably compare Western forms of urban planning, rationality and esthetics with newer forms of Asian or Chinese construction. However, rather than interpreting the (widespread) depiction of speculative construction as destroying cityscapes as a manifestation of colonial hierarchies and racist stereotypes, the argument advanced here is that such stereotypes – including perspectives on “the Chinese” – are emergent consequences of the material itineraries currently put in place, and with which practically everyone have daily experience. One reviewer has suggested that the emphasis on “the Chinese” obscures the underlying capitalist logic of these new itineraries and economic situations, with the implication that anti-Chinese sentiment is really a proxy for dissatisfaction with foreign, capitalist interference. But the fact that I have never heard any locals speak of such a proxy suggests that this perspective is just as external as the Western preference for colonial French architecture. From the perspective of critical social science, it is certainly possible, and possibly important, to conceptualize the situation as indexing underlying capitalist causes. But this is to add another (social science) perspective to the kaleidoscope.

²⁶ See footnote 9 for details about my treatment of “the Chinese.”

²⁷ See also discussion in David Hutt. 1 September 2016. “How China Came to Dominate Cambodia,” The Diplomat. Accessed 22 April 2019. https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/how-china-came-to-dominate-cambodia.

²⁸ Oknha, which roughly translates as “nobleman,” is the highest civilian title in Cambodia. Since the 1990s, large donations of money to the government have been required to be eligible for the title. The term is often used as equivalent to “tycoon.”