Summers Yunnan-A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia

A Case Study of China's Political and Economic Relations with its Neighbours
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-85709-445-2
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Chandos Asian Studies Series

The Chinese Government's five-year strategy for social and economic development to 2015 includes the aim of making the southwestern province of Yunnan a bridgehead for 'opening the country' to southeast Asia and south Asia. Yunnan - A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia traces the dynamic process which has led to this policy goal, a process through which Yunnan is being repositioned from a southwestern periphery of the People's Republic of China to a 'bridgehead' between China and its regional neighbours. It shows how this has been expressed in ideas and policy frameworks, involvement in regional institutions, infrastructure development, and changing trade and investment flows, from the 1980s to the present.Detailing the wider context of the changes in China's global interactions, especially in Asia, the book uses Yunnan's case to demonstrate the extent of provincial agency in global interactions in reform-era China, and provides new insights into both China's relationships with its Asian neighbours and the increasingly important economic engagement between developing countries. - Offers a new perspective on Yunnan - Contains historical depth: understanding the background and developments over time means that this 'China watching' book will not date quickly - Takes a provincial view of China's international relations

Tim Summers writes on the politics, economy, and international relations of contemporary China. He is a Senior Consulting Fellow with Chatham House in London, teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and advises corporates and investors on China. Tim holds a PhD in Chinese Studies from CUHK, and an MA from the University of Cambridge. He was British Consul-General in Chongqing from 2004 to 2007, when he traveled extensively in southwest China, including in Yunnan.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Summers, Tim

Leseproben

1 Introduction: why Yunnan?
Abstract:
This chapter sets out the focus of and motivation for the book, and how it relates to existing studies of Yunnan province. Key words Yunnan western China political economy southeast Asia south Asia bridgehead This book examines the changing role of Yunnan province in structuring relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its Asian neighbours. It traces a dynamic process through which Yunnan is being repositioned from a southwestern periphery of the PRC to become a Chinese ‘bridgehead’ to southeast and south Asia. Since the early 1990s this process has found expression in the intertwining of ideas, policy frameworks, participation in regional institutions, infrastructure development and trade and investment. While this book is about Yunnan, it also demonstrates the extent of provincial agency in global interactions in reform-era China, changes in China’s economic geography and the growing importance of China’s economic and commercial interactions with its neighbours in southeast and south Asia. My own interest in this topic was stimulated by numerous visits to Yunnan in the early 2000s, when I was based in the municipality of Chongqing, to Yunnan’s northwest. In particular, I heard plenty from government officials in the province about Yunnan’s membership of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), a forum for the promotion of economic and commercial integration between the five countries of the southeast Asian peninsula and southwest China. This led me to think about what Yunnan’s role in this organisation meant for China’s international relations. A main motivation for this book is to examine China’s changing political and economic interactions with its Asian neighbours from the perspective of a province, rather than that of the capital, Beijing. This approach is particularly fruitful in Yunnan. One of the features of the province is its shared 4,060 km land border with three of China’s Asian neighbours, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar (or Burma1). Yunnan is land-locked (Figure 1.1), and so this land border – rather than the sea – provides its access to the rest of the region. Figure 1.1 Map of Yunnan province Source: www.chinaplanner.com. When you travel to Yunnan’s border regions, the proximity of these southeast Asian neighbours becomes apparent. In Malipo county, for example, evidence of Vietnam’s proximity can be seen through public use of Vietnamese script alongside Chinese. When I was further down the border with Vietnam in Guangxi (the province to the southeast of Yunnan), a local labour exchange was offering training in Vietnamese for migrant workers who had been forced to return home in 2009 after the global financial crisis hit Chinese industry. In southern Yunnan’s Jinghong, I sat in cafés listening to Thai pop music and eating Thai cuisine ordered from a menu written in both English and Thai, but not Chinese, while traders from Myanmar and the wider region plied their wares in shops along the main street. Diversity is a hallmark of Yunnan, and it is the province’s geographical, cultural, biological and ethnic diversity which has been the focus of much outside interest and provides rich material for study. For example, Xishuangbanna, the prefecture in the province’s south where Jinghong is located, is home to more than 5,000 plant types, constituting one-sixth of the national total, and over 50 protected animal species, around a third of the national total. Away from the subtropical climate of Jinghong, up in the north of Yunnan, paths wind up into snow-covered mountains and on to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. It is from here that some of Asia’s largest rivers fall, plummeting through steep valleys in Yunnan to flow through southeast Asia and into the South China Sea. One of these, the Mekong – called the Lancang inside China’s borders – gave its name to the GMS forum, and we will return to this in Chapter 5. But it is perhaps Yunnan’s ethnic diversity which has garnered most interest, and drawn in many of the tourists who visit this province. My own first visit was in the summer of 1999. Like many others from within China and overseas, I went not just to the provincial capital Kunming, but also to Dali and Lijiaxng, two cities known both for their beautiful natural surroundings and for the minority groups which have lived there for centuries. Indeed, Yunnan has a reputation as being a ‘museum of human races’ (Scott, 2009: 8), reflecting a long and complex history of migrations through the mountainous terrain which covers some five-sixths of the province’s land area. The 1950s saw a coordinated government and academic project to categorise the various ‘nationalities’, or what have become known as ethnicities, resident in the newly established PRC, based on Stalinist criteria of common language, territory, economic activity and culture, as well as on historical categories inherited from the pre-twentieth-century Ming and Qing dynasties. The project prompted some 400 groups from Yunnan alone to apply for recognition, though the number was whittled down in the 1950s to 55 categories across the PRC (including the Han majority); a fifty-sixth category – from Yunnan as it happens – was added in 1979.2 Unlike some other provinces in western China, however, Yunnan has not been designated an ‘autonomous minority region’, the term used since the 1950s to describe five of China’s provinces, including Yunnan’s provincial neighbour, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Even though it houses significant numbers of 25 of the PRC’s 55 official minority peoples (and small numbers of most of the others), no one group was large or dominant enough to be a basis for Yunnan to have been made an autonomous region. Today Yunnan’s minorities do not actually dominate the province’s population: the majority Han Chinese account for two-thirds of the 45 million registered population, although, as noted in Chapter 3, this has not always been the case. From the late 1950s through the Cultural Revolution was a bad time for many of these groups, as ‘class struggle’ and efforts to homogenise society meant the marginalisation and destruction of many diverse cultural and religious practices. Following China’s reforms of the late 1970s the policy emphasis shifted again, not just to an acceptance of cultural difference but to its commercial exploitation through the development of tourist and cultural industries which promoted – and commodified – the ways of life of many of these groups. This was a major feature of development in Yunnan, and since then tourism has been big business. Discussion of these issues of culture and ethnicity dominates the literature on Yunnan (Bossen, 2002; Chang, 2006; Litzinger, 2000; Harrell, 1995; Miller, 1994; Mueggler, 2001; chapters in Rossabi, 2004; Walsh, 2001; Weng, 2006; Wu, 1990), and a stream of anthropological writing about Yunnan has emerged, perhaps in turn contributing to the creation of dominant perceptions of it as an ‘ethnic minority’ province. A lot of this writing takes as its context questions of the relations between the (Han) state and (minority) society within the PRC. Others have increasingly put the study of these minority groups in a wider regional context and explored their connections across the PRC’s borders, or examined the social and cultural similarities between societies from southwest China through upland southeast Asia to India’s northeast.3 Previous studies on Yunnan
The scope for writing on these topics is still substantial, but it is not Yunnan’s diversity or ethnic minorities which are the focus here. Instead, this book examines Yunnan’s role in structuring China’s political and economic relations with its neighbours, in particular by looking into the changing stances taken by provincial elites to these relationships. My approach is influenced by a number of different academic disciplines, but overall is closest to global political economy.4 The research is based primarily on analysis of provincial-level documentary evidence such as reports or speeches setting out government policy, newspaper reports and the work of Chinese academics and think-tanks, as well as reflecting my own personal experiences of southwest China. Questions of the structure of Yunnan’s relations to southeast and south Asia and within China have been touched on in some existing writing on the province. There is a reasonably substantial literature on the Mekong region including the GMS, especially since the 1990s (Chen, 2005a; Dosch, 2007; Dosch et al., 2005; Ebashi, 2010; Goh, 2007; Shih, 2002; Than, 1996, 1997; and numerous publications by the Asian Development Bank). There is also plenty of writing on the related issues of dam building and hydropower development on the Mekong River in Yunnan, and their impact on transborder relations, and I return to these in Chapter 5....