Laos in the Asian century : development, displacement and Chinese regionalism

After more than three decades of relatively uninterrupted economic growth across much of Asia, there is now considerable hype around what a number of thinkers have described as the beginnings of an ‘Asian’ Century. As the region has grown more economically prosperous one important shift in global political-economic relations has been the expansion of bilateral and multilateral aid flows from new donors such as China, India and South Korea. In this thesis I focus on the implications of Chinese aid and investment within Laos, a land- locked and least developed country located at the geographic centre of mainland Southeast Asia. The principal objectives of this research were (1) to consider how a growth in Chinese aid and investment is reconfiguring the operation of the global development sector in Laos, (2) how Chinese development strategies compare to those of more traditional donors and (3) to explore who is benefitting or being disadvantaged by China’s growing presence. Throughout the research process these three substantive interests coalesced around three further analytical themes concerning, (1) the reconfiguration of geographies of development through global neoliberalism, (2) the growing importance of urban centres to national development, and (3) the apparent correlation between increased Chinese interests in Laos and growing rates of development-induced displacement. The central finding of this research is that the emergence of China as a new aid donor has seen the perpetuation of high-modernist, technocratic and apolitical discourses of development. This is an approach that is seeing the rapid modernisation of countries such as Laos, but that is also leading to many new forms of poverty, marginalisation and disadvantage. Drawing from a post-development viewpoint, this thesis concludes by suggesting that responding to the poverty inducing effects of Chinese aid is dependent on the ‘re-politicisation’ of development in Asia. The research draws on desk-based analysis, ten months of field research in Laos and 84 interviews with members of the country’s development sector