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ABSTRACT
The rise in transnational land deals has brought nationally inflected concerns about foreign land acquisition into uneasy tension with longstanding scholarly and popular concerns about dispossession. Using the case of Chinese rubber plantation promotion projects in northern Laos, we examine the intersection of these two processes during the boom decade of the 2000s, as well as the aftermath during the 2010s, when global rubber prices have fallen. We describe a ‘long’ land grab from upland communities in northern Laos that cannot be blamed on either ‘the Chinese’ (whether private, state or both) or Lao government policy, which has long mobilized political and legal authority to enclose smallholder lands for national development. Rather, what is significant is the interaction of regulatory politics and market dynamics under conditions of both unequal international relations and internally competing policy agendas on both sides of the border. Examining a case where the initial regulatory impulse from the host government was for the protection of smallholder land tenure, the paper demonstrates the need to examine the interaction of local land governance and international relations in a way that treats the latter as the product of internal struggles rather than coherent national strategy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research on which this article is based benefitted from the first author’s ongoing discussions with and generous advice from Keith Barney, Ian Baird, Antonella Diana, Yayoi Fujita, Derek Hall, Christian Lund, Peter Messerli, Nancy Peluso, Jeff Romm, Nathan Sayre, Weiyi Shi, Michael Watts, Jerome Whitington and Kevin Woods; and from both authors’ assistance more recently from Andrew Bartlett, Chimmy Bounlom, Melanie Canet, Cecilie Friis, Khamla Inmieugxay, Stuart Ling, Weiyi Shi, Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt and Zhuang-Fang Yi. We have also benefitted from comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper from Mladen Grgic, Julie Klinger, Juliet Lu, Joshua Muldavin, Gustavo Oliveira, Kevin Woods and two anonymous reviewers from TPG. The first author acknowledges the generous support of the Social Science Research Council (with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the University of California, while the second author acknowledges the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), for partial support under grant number 400440 152167. Both authors thank the Helvetas LURAS project for commissioning our collaborative research in 2015.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Original figures, in RMB, have been converted at a rate of 0.15 USD/RMB.
2 Meeting minutes, November 2000.
3 Project document for cooperative rubber development project, Luang Namtha, August 2000; Project document for the building of a rubber processing facility, Luang Namtha, January 2001. Also see Shi (Citation2008, p. 25 n9).
4 Project document, cooperative rubber development project, Luang Namtha, January 2001.
5 Project document, cooperative rubber development project, Luang Namtha, August 2000 (emphasis added).
6 Cover letter, February 2005; Draft plan, Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, no date.
7 Draft plan, pp. 1–2.
8 The draft plan specifies 667 and 2,667 hectares per year of company and smallholder plantation, respectively, in each of the three provinces (pp. 6–7).
9 Sino-Lao Rubber Company, project proposal document for Luang Namtha Province, May 2005, pp. 3–4.
10 Sino-Lao Rubber Company, project proposal document for Luang Namtha Province, May 2005, p. 4.
11 Sino-Lao Rubber Company, project proposal document for Luang Namtha Province, May 2005; see Dwyer (Citation2011) for details.
12 Minutes of the meeting about Chinese cooperative rubber planting between Luang Namtha, Oudomxai and Bokeo provinces, 10 October 2005, authorized by the governor of Luang Namtha; article 2.2.
13 Compare the official minutes with the ‘Minutes of the meeting to revise and plan the implementation of Chinese cooperative rubber investment promotion,’ 10 October 2005, Oudomsin Hotel, Luang Namtha, unstamped and unsigned, p. 2.
14 See previous two notes.
15 Government interview by the second author, Oudomxai province, July 2015.
16 Government interview by the second author, Oudomxai province, July 2015.
17 Village interview by the second author, Oudomxai province, July 2015.
18 Village interview by the second author, Luang Namtha province, July 2015.
19 Government interview by the second author, Oudomxai province, July 2015.
20 Government interview by the second author, Oudomxai province, July 2015.