Our colloquium series is back for 2022, both online and in-person!
Join us on Tuesday 20th September with:
Dr. Juliet Lu
Assistant Professor
Department of Forest Resources Management
School of Public Policy & Global Affairs.
The Smell of Chinese Money
How Chinese Rubber Investments are Transforming Northern Laos
The smell of tapped rubber trees, of their milky liquid latex congealing in the tropical heat, has become synonymous in northern Laos with the influence of Chinese capital. From 1997 to 2007, Chinese land investment in Laos increased tenfold with rubber being the top crop invested in. Some welcomed this influx for its potential to drive economic development; others decried a Chinese “takeover” of its small southern neighbour.
These contrasting hopes and fears mirror a global debate over the merits of rising transnational land investments, particularly those originating from countries whose political and economic systems – like China’s – are feared as opaque and impervious to international governance mechanisms and norms.
Through the case of Chinese rubber investments, Dr. Lu explores the ways Chinese capital is extending beyond its borders and the resultant impacts on local economic development, regimes of resource management, and patterns of state formation in Laos. She argues that Chinese rubber companies differ from other transnational land investors, but not in the ways most critics fear.
Instead of functioning as an unrestricted, unaccountable force of capitalist exploitation, she documents how Chinese rubber companies in Laos are constrained and disciplined through their responsibilities to larger Chinese and Lao state development and diplomatic agendas. These findings contribute to broader understandings of how Chinese state capital is understood in a global context, and how transnational land investments are shaped by intertwined host- and investor-country state agendas.
This in-person event takes place on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), who have lived on this land since time immemorial.
Register to receive Zoom meeting details via email if you would like to attend remotely.
