This is the first book to focus explicitly on how China’s rise as a major economic and political actor has affected societies in Southeast Asia. It examines how Chinese investors, workers, tourists, bureaucrats, longtime residents, and adventurers interact throughout Southeast Asia. The contributors use case studies to show the scale of Chinese influence in the region and the ways in which various countries mitigate their unequal relationship with China by negotiating asymmetry, circumventing hegemony, and embracing, resisting, or manipulating the terms dictated by Chinese capital.

Foreword / Wang Gungwu

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: China’s “Rise” in Southeast Asia from a Bottom-Up Perspective / Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan

Part One | Identities

1. Investors, Managers, Brokers, and Culture Workers: How Migrants from China Are Changing the Meaning of Ch-ineseness in Cambodia / Pál Nyíri

2. Multiplying Diversities: How “New” Chinese Mobilities Are Changing Singapore / Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin

3. Translocal Pious Entrepreneurialism: Hui Business and Religious Activities in Malaysia and Indonesia / Hew Wai Weng

Part Two | Livelihoods

4. Border Guanxi: Xinyimin and Transborder Trade in Northern Thailand / Aranya Siriphon

5. Ambivalent Encounters: Business and the Sex Markets at the China-Vietnam Borderland / Caroline Grillot and Juan

Part Three | Norms

6. Entangling Alliances: Elite Cooperation and Competition in the Philippines and China / Caroline S. Hau

7. Chinese Enclaves in the Golden Triangle Borderlands: An Alternative Account of State-Formation in Laos / Danielle Tan

8. “China in Burma”: A Multiscalar Political Economy Analysis / Kevin Woods

9. Water Governance in the Mekong Basin: Scalar Trade-offs, Transnational Norms, and Chinese Hydropower Investment / Oliver Hensengerth

Part Four | Aspirations

10. “Search for Knowledge as Far as China!” Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China / Johanes Herlijanto

11. Stimulating Circuits: Chinese Desires and Transnational Affective Economies in Southeast Asia / Chris Lyttleton

Glossary of Chinese Characters

References

Contributors

Index