In this chapter, I critically reflect on the inescapable expectation to write first and foremost on China's assertive infrastructure push under the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) label when studying current developments in (northern) Laos. I start instead by considering uncertainty and change as integral parts of northern Lao traders' transnational worlds. Their engagement with the intensified, but not unprecedented, Chinese impact in the region needs to be understood against the backdrop of their resilience, versatility, and resourcefulness in continually finding new venues for economic experimentation-and in living with, and actively impacting on, China-driven developments. I flesh out how they translate, reproduce, or challenge larger Chinese visions of modernity, development, and infrastructural connectivity as aspirations, hopes, dreams, and fears.

This chapter examines the practices of an ethnically diverse group of traders from the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha at regional cross-border trade fairs in adjacent Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in China's Yunnan province. It critically unpacks their frequent claims to share Tai Lue ethnicity with most of the local customers at these fairs. I demonstrate that, instead of constituting an authentic instance of revived longstanding Tai Lue ethnic cross-border networks, their voiced and performed fictive ethnic intimacy is a pragmatic strategy to target Xishuangbanna's Dai (Tai Lue) customers. Therein, they tactically mirror Chinese local officials' and entrepreneurs' attempts to advertise Xishuangbanna's geographical and ethno-cultural proximity to its Southeast Asian neighbours through a broad and ambiguous notion of "Dainess."

By establishing Luang Namtha's past and present role as a regionally central intersection instead of a national periphery, this chapter examines this province's municipal marketplaces in their spatial and material organization as sites where transnational commodity flows and trade intermediaries, vendors, customers, and travellers from multi-ethnic and multi-national backgrounds intersect and interact-leading to what I conceptualize as locally rooted "banal cosmopolitanism." Adopting a practical understanding of cosmopolitanism, I refer to the shopkeepers' and traders' capacity to conceive and manoeuvre the overall transnational dimension of their local social and economic lives. Browsing through these marketplaces, this chapter demonstrates that this cosmopolitan handling of transnationality is, seemingly paradoxically, rooted in clear articulations and negotiations of national differences and boundaries.

This chapter focuses on Luang Namtha traders' role in the transnational trade of Thai fruits between Thailand and China, radiating out from a Tai Lue village in northern Thailand. They appear to have a major stake as middlemen mediating between Thai and Chinese traders' fruit-related quality contestations. Central to this is their discourse and practice of reserving high-quality fruits for the Chinese market and mediocre fruits for the Lao market. While their view of an under-performing agricultural sector explains the import of Thai fruits, their perception of China's economic supremacy explains the further export of premium fruits to China. Lao cross-border traders purposely reproduce a frontier of nationally stereotyped differences to enable and sustain the transnational flow of Thai fruits.

Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infrastructural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infrastructures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim.

Since the launch of the BRI, particular modes of movement are integral to its vision of what it means to be a modern world citizen. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Southeast Asia, where China-backed infrastructure projects expand, and at great speed. Such infrastructure projects are carriers of particular versions of modernity, promising rapid mobility to populations better connected than ever before. Yet, until now, little attention has been paid to how mobility and promises of mobility intersect with local understandings of development. In the introduction to this special issue, we argue that it is essential to think about the role infrastructure plays in forms of development that place connectivity at the center. We suggest that considering development, mobility and modernity together is enlightening because it interrogates the connections between these interlocking themes. Through an introduction to five ethnographically grounded papers and two commentaries, all of which engage with infrastructures in different contexts throughout Southeast Asia, we demonstrate that there are significant gaps between official policy and lived experience. This makes the need to interrogate what infrastructure, mobilities, and global China really mean all the more pressing.

By establishing Luang Namtha’s past and present role as a regionally central intersection instead of a national periphery, this chapter examines this province’s municipal marketplaces in their spatial and material organization as sites where transnational commodity flows and trade intermediaries, vendors, customers, and travellers from multi-ethnic and multi-national backgrounds intersect and interact—leading to what I conceptualize as locally rooted “banal cosmopolitanism.” Adopting a practical understanding of cosmopolitanism, I refer to the shopkeepers’ and traders’ capacity to conceive and manoeuvre the overall transnational dimension of their local social and economic lives. Browsing through these marketplaces, this chapter demonstrates that this cosmopolitan handling of transnationality is, seemingly paradoxically, rooted in clear articulations and negotiations of national differences and boundaries.

This chapter focuses on Luang Namtha traders’ role in the transnational trade of Thai fruits between Thailand and China, radiating out from a Tai Lue village in northern Thailand. They appear to have a major stake as middlemen mediating between Thai and Chinese traders’ fruit-related quality contestations. Central to this is their discourse and practice of reserving high-quality fruits for the Chinese market and mediocre fruits for the Lao market. While their view of an under-performing agricultural sector explains the import of Thai fruits, their perception of China’s economic supremacy explains the further export of premium fruits to China. Lao cross-border traders purposely reproduce a frontier of nationally stereotyped differences to enable and sustain the transnational flow of Thai fruits.

Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders’ indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.

This chapter attends to individual traders’ narratives that lie behind the cosmopolitan outlook of local marketplaces in Luang Namtha province. They reveal instances of entrepreneurial experimentation and accomplishments rooted in notable degrees of transnational knowledge, experience, and skills. Yet, closer examination is needed to render those visible as these narratives are not formulated as success stories, but instead framed in a markedly self-deprecating manner, downplaying the scale and professionalism of their economic activities. Moreover, many traders outline their involvement in trade as non-occupational as they have not learned any proper occupation. This narrated weakness and insignificance, which nonetheless allows in practice for successful entrepreneurial trajectories, might be one reason for their virtual invisibility in scholarship on contemporary socio-economic issues in Laos.

In this chapter, I critically reflect on the inescapable expectation to write first and foremost on China’s assertive infrastructure push under the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) label when studying current developments in (northern) Laos. I start instead by considering uncertainty and change as integral parts of northern Lao traders’ transnational worlds. Their engagement with the intensified, but not unprecedented, Chinese impact in the region needs to be understood against the backdrop of their resilience, versatility, and resourcefulness in continually finding new venues for economic experimentation—and in living with, and actively impacting on, China-driven developments. I flesh out how they translate, reproduce, or challenge larger Chinese visions of modernity, development, and infrastructural connectivity as aspirations, hopes, dreams, and fears.

This chapter examines the practices of an ethnically diverse group of traders from the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha at regional cross-border trade fairs in adjacent Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in China’s Yunnan province. It critically unpacks their frequent claims to share Tai Lue ethnicity with most of the local customers at these fairs. I demonstrate that, instead of constituting an authentic instance of revived longstanding Tai Lue ethnic cross-border networks, their voiced and performed fictive ethnic intimacy is a pragmatic strategy to target Xishuangbanna’s Dai (Tai Lue) customers. Therein, they tactically mirror Chinese local officials’ and entrepreneurs’ attempts to advertise Xishuangbanna’s geographical and ethno-cultural proximity to its Southeast Asian neighbours through a broad and ambiguous notion of “Dainess.”

"Rivers of iron: railroads and Chinese power in Southeast Asia." Asian Studies Review, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

The concluding chapter once more wraps up northern Lao cross-border traders’ different facets and repertoires of conscious strategies and interiorized habits of smallness. It reflects on how an ethnography of the allegedly banal and trivial can shed significant light on larger dynamics of globalization, neoliberal development, geopolitics, and infrastructure intersecting in the borderlands of China, Laos, and Thailand. I discuss how this lens of smallness can contribute to new understandings of, and research agendas for, conventionally ethnicized hinterlands, uplands, or borderlands in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Previously articulated within several regional multilateral frameworks, the "China-Laos Railway" eventually turned into a flagship project of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Started in 2016 and planned to be completed in late 2021, this project will provide Laos with unprecedented railway infrastructure, linking its capital Vientiane with China through the northern border town of Boten. This paper critically scrutinizes the underlying geo-economic win-win rhetoric of coupling China's regional BRI ambitions with Laos' national vision of transforming into a land-linked country. Understanding the newest BRI labeling of infrastructural connectivity against the backdrop of Laos' and the region's longer-lasting neoliberal developmental trajectory, I examine the financial mechanism of the railway project and the different temporal and spatial scales of Laos' and China's calculation of potential benefits. These are juxtaposed with the empirical reality of already visible dynamics and impacts of Chinese investment alongside the railway. Together, they tend to paint a future of Chinese profits at the expense of Laos' sustainable long-term development. Contributing to much-needed grounded accounts of local unfoldings of China-backed megaprojects, I pay particular attention to vernacular discourse and experience to fully understand the nature, processes and impacts of BRI financing.