Southeast Asia in the "Chinese Century" (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam)

Book

A book by Danielle Tan and Caroline Grillot has just been published.
Full description of the book (French text)

Between fascination and fear, enthusiasm and hostility, the new Chinese migration raises questions. The work on "China in Africa" has obscured the importance of China’s emergence for its closest neighbours. This omission is particularly glaring in the case of Southeast Asia, which has always been the main arena for China’s trade engagements with the world. Considered as China’s natural backyard, Southeast Asia is a complex and heterogeneous laboratory of circulations and identities under construction at the dawn of the "Chinese century".

The question of relations between China and the rest of the world is sometimes thought of in terms of domination, threat, exploitation and support for authoritarian regimes, and sometimes in terms of opportunities for development. This research proposes to go beyond this binary approach by describing the strategies implemented by local actors to mitigate unequal power relations, negotiate asymmetry, circumvent hegemony, embrace, resist or manipulate the terms dictated by Chinese capital.

This study, which focuses on the countries of former French Indochina (Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos), is the first step in a broader editorial project that aims to meet this challenge.