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.
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. Other transborder areas covered in previous work include the environment, HIV/AIDS and drug trafficking (Su, 2000; Hyde, 2007; Chin, 2009; see also Evans et al., 2000).
When it comes to Yunnan’s identity, it has been suggested that ‘In terms of geography, environment, population and culture, Yunnan was, and in many ways still is, a northern extension of mainland southeast Asia’ (Stuart-Fox, 2003: 53). One young academic was told in the early 1990s by a number of university anthropology departments in the United States that ‘Yunnan was not really part of China’ (E. Walsh, 2009; see also Tapp, 2010) – not the conclusion reached in this book.
An influential volume of papers called China Deconstructs (Goodman and Segal, 1994) looked at the impact of regional economic growth in China. In that volume, Ingrid d’Hooghe (1994: 286–7) argued ‘it is quite conceivable that Yunnan’s economy will become inextricably bound with the South-east Asian region’. The pull of relations to the province’s south was also behind the later comment by Margaret Swain (2002: 179) that ‘Yunnan at the beginning of the twenty-first century is again orienting toward its southern borderlands.’
This book certainly finds evidence of growing interactions between Yunnan and its Asian neighbours. These interactions have started to be reflected more in recent discussions of Yunnan, from analysis by the diplomatic research organisation International Crisis Group (2009) to travel guides and the work of academics (Booz, 1997; Yang and Ng, 2008), although at the same time Yunnan is still often described as ‘remote’, with minimal reference to the possible implications of its geographical proximity to China’s Asian neighbours.5
However, I contend that these transborder relations cannot be understood without also examining the ways in which Yunnan relates to other parts of China, including the central authorities. The integration of the province into successive Chinese states has been a long historical process (see Chapter 3), and was especially marked in the early years of the PRC (Solinger, 1977a).
The further strengthening of this national belonging means that my conclusions are somewhat different from a characterisation of Yunnan’s orientation over the last couple of decades in terms of a unidirectional shift towards southeast Asia. Alongside the growing development of Yunnan’s links to southeast and south Asia has come an intensification of economic and commercial links with other parts of China, based – as are many of the transborder interactions – on rapid development of infrastructure and transport networks tying these places more closely together. It is this ‘double opening’ of Yunnan, both to societies across national borders in Asia and to neighbouring territories within the PRC, which provides the foundation for the idea of Yunnan as a ‘Chinese bridgehead to Asia’, the title of this book.
Neither is this idea of ‘bridgehead’ just something used at the local level within Yunnan itself, as some have suggested (one example is Zha, 2012). Ever since then Party General Secretary Hu Jintao visited Yunnan in July 2009, developing Yunnan into a ‘bridgehead’ has had a seal of approval from the highest levels of the PRC’s party-state. Further, the national government’s programme for social and economic development from 2011 to 2015 includes the aim that Yunnan be made into an ‘important bridgehead for opening to the southwest’ (Twelfth Five-Year Programme, 2011: 131; see Chapter 4 for further details). This book sets out a history of the ideas and practical developments which have led to these important statements at the national level.
A provincial case study of China’s political and economic relations
As a provincial case study of China’s political and economic relations with its neighbours, the conclusions of this book are relevant beyond Yunnan, primarily to two themes of wider interest related to contemporary China. The first is the role of provinces in the changing dynamics of China’s global interactions, part of a wider set of questions about their role in Chinese policy-making and practice. This book’s case study of Yunnan aims to shed light on the extent of ‘provincial agency’ – the ability of policy elites at the provincial level to influence events – in China’s global interactions. I argue that this can help us to understand shifts in economic geography within the PRC, including the development of western China.
The second question is the development since the 1990s of China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, in particular with territories in southeast and south Asia. This is not just about China and Asia, but has implications for understanding China’s growing global influence, and perhaps also for structural shifts in global political economy, based on the premise of an analysis of the nature of the relationships between the PRC and the global economy over recent decades. These questions constitute the conceptual framework for this study of Yunnan, and I set them out in detail in Chapter 2.
There are, however, numerous dimensions to the processes this study describes which one book cannot cover comprehensively. Among these is the different ways in which the repositioning of Yunnan plays out at both a non-elite and a local, sub-provincial level. With a population of 45 million and a geographical area of 394,000 square kilometres, these local variations are likely to be substantial, more so given the particular social and geographical diversity of Yunnan. More detailed analysis at this local scale will have to wait for another occasion.6
I touch in a little more detail on another area which would also merit more study. Yunnan is not the only entity for which a bridging role of some sort between China and Asia is claimed. When it comes to China and southeast Asia, for example, Yunnan’s provincial neighbour to the southeast, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is also a provincial-level focus of cooperation. Like Yunnan, Guangxi has land borders with southeast Asia, though in its case only with Vietnam. Unlike Yunnan, it has sea ports, and hence direct access to trading routes through the South China Sea. Over the last decade, elites in Guangxi, like their counterparts in Yunnan, have been positioning it as a natural intermediary between China and southeast Asia. I touch on specific aspects of this in passing, and in Chapter 8 I discuss briefly the wider questions of provincial agency this raises.
On a similar theme, but outside China’s borders, developments in the early 2010s in Myanmar have again drawn attention to that country’s position ‘between China and India’ (Thant, 2011; see also Egreteau, 2008; Zhao, 2007), although whether as a bridge or a barrier is perhaps too early to say. Myanmar is also often seen both as part of southeast Asia and as part of south Asia, and this highlights another sub-theme of this book: that regions are not unchanging entities, but are themselves constructed through contingent historical, political or social processes. Further research can be done on the responses in Myanmar and elsewhere in southeast and south Asia to the emergence of the ‘bridgehead’ idea. This book looks at this from the Chinese side of the border.
Structure of the book
This chapter has set out the main motivations for this investigation into Yunnan’s changing role in China’s political and economic relationships with neighbouring territories in southeast and south Asia. The rest of the book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 sets out background to the conceptual framework in Chinese studies within which this book is located. Chapter 3 gives a history of Yunnan in a global and regional context; this is important both in understanding where today’s province has come from and because of the way that this history has been instrumentalised in recent years to support certain policy approaches. Chapter 4 delves into the historical development of policy ideas behind the emergence of Yunnan as a ‘bridgehead’, and relates these to some of the policies which have supported their development. Chapters 5–7 then look at how these ideas have been expressed in practice, through Yunnan’s involvement in transborder institutions, the development of transport infrastructure and growth in regional trade and investment, respectively.
The concluding chapter summarises the main findings and evaluates their wider significance. It suggests that the case of Yunnan demonstrates the extent of provincial agency in transborder interactions and international relations, and that the concept of ‘competitive internationalisation’ is useful in understanding the way that different provinces relate to each other in exercising this agency. It further argues that western Chinese provinces such as Yunnan are becoming more significant in China’s political economy. Finally, it suggests some implications for understanding China’s relationships with the Asian neighbourhood to its southwest, and sketches some possible future global implications of developments in this part of the PRC.
1I will generally use ‘Myanmar’ to refer to the country in the years after its English name was changed by the regime in 1989, but still use ‘Burma’ for historical references or when quoting from sources which use this name in English.
2For one account of this process see Schein (2000: 80–91).
3For an example of the former see Cheung (2000); for the latter see work on ‘Zomia’, such as that by James Scott (2009).
4Influenced by anthropology, history and a dose of ideational and discourse analysis in Chapter 4.
5For example Donaldson (2011: 26), who has only brief comment on the implications of the border.
6A preliminary analysis of perspectives from Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan’s south, can be found in Summers (2010).