Abstract
Now in its 25th year, the Asian Development Bank’s ambitious Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) program continues to spur Asian regionalism in its quest to develop a competitive economic bloc along the Mekong River. The GMS program links together 300 million people in resource-rich Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan and Guanxi Zhuang provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Turning previous ‘battlefields into market places’ as Thai Prime Minister Choonhavan stated in 1980, rapid economic growth has ensued through neoliberal economic projects promoting cross-border integration, infrastructural connectivity and cross-sectoral linkages. What is too often overlooked is the effect of such change on sociocultural systems and individual aspirations. In Intimate Economies of Development, Chris Lyttleton takes a step back from macroeconomic goals and strategies and presents thoughtful, empathetic sketches into the diverse experiences of people living amidst rapid regional economic change.
The book is organized around four ethnographic essays detailing personal narratives within special economic zones (SEZ) and border towns anchored around rubber plantations, casinos, massage parlours, fishing boats, refugee camps and garment factories. By painting the affective landscape, the work traces capitalist expansion and how these changes formulate one’s values and aspirations from both material and intimate dimensions. In these frontier zones, where modernity and tradition are intertwined, the author suggests that increased precariousness of livelihoods and organization of surplus labour serve as the regional economy’s competitive advantage. This work concludes that current risk mitigation programmes are inadequate as safeguards against the far-reaching vulnerabilities created by modernity, mainly because affective economies are not assessed in the process of creating such programmes.
The first essay successfully paints a picture of social transformation in Northern Laos following the 2003 privatization of rubber cultivation in China and the ‘poppy substitution project’ to suppress opium cultivation. Through these policies, the author depicts increasingly racialized intimate relations in which ethnic minority Akha women in Laos are pursued by Chinese investors and smallholders as a valuable resource to gain access to village land. In contrast, Akha men in Laos are less able to pursue romantic relations with Akha women in China, because the former lack wealth and ‘national superiority’. The same trend also occurs along Myanmar and Vietnam’s borders with China. For example, land development and forest protection programmes have led to village consolidation and resettlement of people along the Northern Economic Corridor. As a result, Khmu women in Northern Laos have turned to new practices of sex work as ways to accumulate capital and start businesses. As ‘voluntary’ prostitution gradually exceeds regional human trafficking common in the 1990s, the author contends that this type of self-exploitation and entrepreneurship showcases the resilience of people attempting to forge a better life.
Diving deeper into the effects of cross-border market integration inculcated by the GMS program, the second essay explores SEZs. These draw investment capital from China and Thailand into Cambodia and Laos but are heavily masculinized frontiers and harbingers of illicit economies of sex and drugs. The Golden Boten City, built by a Chinese businessman on leased land, was advertised as an enclave of modernity to develop Northern Laos, but the area mainly serviced Chinese clients (who did not need a visa to visit the SEZ) before pervasive crime and violence led to the City’s shut down. Experiences of migrants to the Dok Ngiew Kham casino are highlighted as an import-driven, formative space of desire for both the material and intimate due to the blatant advertisements of risk-taking, opportunity for wealth accumulation and sexual excess. Yet the author states that such desires are left unfulfilled: these border zones generate underdevelopment through difficult work conditions, new values and conventions, increased health vulnerabilities and greater instability in romantic relations (which earlier fell under the purview of village norms).
The third section of the book explores, in greater detail, how the ‘precariat’ is produced by assessing narratives from Mae Sot, a key border zone in Thailand along the East–West Economic Corridor that connects Vietnam’s Pacific sea port and Myanmar’s Andaman coast. The town is the main service centre for refugee camps and its industries are mainly built by Burmese migrants in the fishing, garment and sex industries. Labour conditions are tough and migrants are largely unregistered, which leads to poor access to health coverage and ineligibility for children’s schooling. Lyttleton labels these factories as dehumanized spaces where intimacy is rushed both physically and temporally, not in pursuit of freedom but due to the need for emotional connection and the instability of the transient life. The increased presence of mobile individuals in the GMS has also fostered local, generalized anxiety against various ethnic groups which results in ethnic discriminative border policies by state surveillance bodies.
In the last ethnographic essay, the author discusses the evolution of intimate encounters of Vientiane kathoeys (transgender identity) and Chinese Dai women. The societal manufacturing of a specific kathoey identity as an oversexualized, effeminate individual is said to allow a new form of exploitation in which heteronormative men are able to earn money and sexual release by sleeping with kathoeys. In the second case example, Lyttleton discusses married Chinese Dai women who travel to Hat Yai following the easing of travel restrictions in 2002 and subordinate themselves to provide ‘mature companionship’ to Malaysian and Singaporean men as a ‘second wife’. In both cases, capitalism is seen as not necessarily bringing forth individual freedom so much as inflicting enlarged, and many times unfulfilled, aspirations. In such precarious labour environments, sexuality is therefore commoditized as a form of self-enterprise both by heteronormative Lao men and married Dai women.
Drawing upon over 20 years of fieldwork, this book is strongest in its portrayal of daily manifestations of systemic inequalities such as nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, exacerbated by economic integration in the GMS. However, the lack of distinction between multilateral and bilateral development projects, unilateral policies of the Chinese state and private investments, inhibits the work from discussing institutional reforms for risk mitigation in depth. Indeed, it is impossible for change to be without negative repercussions, but the extent to which the risks faced by migrants in these interviews are conditions of modernity itself or based on mismatches between policy formulation and local vulnerabilities is questionable. This line is seemingly blurred without sufficient examination of the development actors themselves. Still, this work offers an important, personal illustration of how individual aspirations are transformed by encounters with modernity and a critique of the tendency for development to overlook social drivers of vulnerability.
A closer view of Amartya Sen’s ‘development as freedom’ proposition is provided by this book as the expansion of capabilities for people to lead their chosen lives not simply grounded in one’s own desires but embedded within the larger political economy. Capitalism expands the capacity to aspire, yet specific policies affect the capability to attain. Each migrant’s story of ‘self-entrepreneurship’ at the cost of increased health vulnerabilities highlighted by this work demonstrates the larger picture in which neoliberal economic policies have a universal constituency to them, yet inadvertently reinforce and widen the spaces of exclusion through systemic inequities and the reshaping of global circuits of value. Deeply grounded in theory and rich in prose, this work offers a new perspective on how the affective economy influences the choices of everyday people in their quest for a better life amidst an increasingly globalized world. Development scholars and practitioners alike would benefit from reading this book. After all, understanding the aspirations of people ought to be the key to unlocking the true potential of development.