Over the past decade, the Chinese state has launched a strategic opium substitution program to support agricultural firms in Yunnan province to invest in northern Myanmar, which is second only to Afghanistan in drug production. These Yunnanese firms are encouraged to collaborate with or hire ex-poppy farmers to plant rubber, sugarcane, tea, corn, and other crops so that these farmers can leave the drug economy successfully. This paper examines the context and challenges of this program through a framework that highlights the tensions between geopolitics and geoeconomics. At one level, the framework demonstrates how the geopolitics–geoeconomics relationship is reinforced by reciprocal control: the promise of monetary profits has become a strategic tool for the Chinese state to implement narcotics control in northern Myanmar. At another level, however, reciprocity is manifested unevenly as not all private producers respond to this strategy in a positive and engaged manner. This unevenness inevitably generates regulatory tensions at multiple scales and underscores, in turn, how border security remains intrinsically unstable vis-a-vis attempts at geoeconomic integration.
AgnewJA (1994)
The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory.Review of International Political Economy1: 53–80.
2.
AmsdenAH (1989) Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization.
New York:
Oxford University Press.
3.
AmsdenAH (2001) The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
4.
BerndtC (2013)
Assembling market b/orders: Violence, dispossession, and economic development in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.Environment and Planning A45: 2646–2662.
5.
BerndtCBoecklerM (2011)
Performative regional (dis) integration: Transnational markets, mobile commodities, and bordered North–South differences.Environment and Planning A43: 1057–1078.
6.
CarrM (2016)
Public–private partnerships in national cyber-security strategies.International Affairs92: 43–62.
7.
ChinKL (2009) The Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia's Drug Trade.
Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
8.
CowenDSmithN (2009)
After geopolitics? From the geopolitical social to geoeconomics.Antipode41: 22–48.
9.
DickenP (2015) Global Shift (Seventh Edition): Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy.
New York:
Guilford Press.
10.
DomoshM (2013)
Geoeconomic imaginations and economic geography in the early twentieth century.Annals of the Association of American Geographers103: 944–966.
11.
DorfmanAFrançaABCFrançaRF (2017)
Political Commodities and Sovereignty Management: Cigarette smuggling across Brazil’s Southern borders.Geopolitics22: 863–886.
12.
FarrellG (1998)
A global empirical review of drug crop eradication and United Nations' crop substitution and alternative development strategies.Journal of Drug Issues28: 395–436.
13.
FitzsimmonsS (2013)
Wheeled warriors: Explaining variations in the use of violence by private security companies in Iraq.Security studies22: 707–739.
14.
GlassmanJ (1999)
State power beyond theterritorial trap: The internationalization of the state.Political Geography18: 669–696.
15.
Gonzalez-VicenteR (2011)
The internationalization of the Chinese state.Political Geography30: 402–411.
16.
HofmanIHoP (2012)
China’s “Developmental Outsourcing”: A critical examination of Chinese global “land grabs” discourse.Journal of Peasant Studies39: 1–48.
17.
JonesL (2014)
Explaining Myanmar's regime transition: The periphery is central.Democratization21: 780–802.
18.
LimKF (2010)
On China's growing geo-economic influence and the evolution of variegated capitalism.Geoforum41: 677–688.
19.
Lim K F (2012) The point is to keep going: the global sub-prime mortgage crisis, local labour market repositioning, and the capital accumulation dynamic in Singapore. Journal of Economic Geography 12: 693–716.
20.
Lim K F (2014) ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ Uneven development, variegated neoliberalization and the dialectical differentiation of state spatiality. Progress in Human Geography 38: 221–247.
21.
LuttwakEN (1990)
From geopolitics to geo-economics: Logic of conflict, grammar of commerce. The National Interest20: 17–23.
22.
MaussM (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.
London:
Routledge.
23.
MoisioSPaasiA (2013)
Beyond state-centricity: Geopolitics of changing state spaces.Geopolitics18: 255–266.
24.
National Narcotics Control Commission (NNCC) (2015) Annual report on drug control in China, 2015.
Beijing:
NNCC.
25.
NorrisWJ (2016) Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control.
Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
26.
ShannonR (2009)
Playing with principles in an era of securitized aid: Negotiating humanitarian space in post-9/11 Afghanistan. Progress in Development Studies9: 15–36.
27.
SnukalKGilbertE (2015)
War, law, jurisdiction, and juridical othering: Private military security contractors and the Nisour Square massacre.Environment and Planning D: Society and Space33: 660–675.
SuX (2015)
Nontraditional security and China's transnational narcotics control in northern Laos and Myanmar.Political Geography48: 72–82.
30.
SuX (2018)
Fragmented sovereignty and the geopolitics of illicit drugs in northern Burma.Political Geography63: 20–30.
31.
UngerJChanA (1995)
China, corporatism, and the East Asian model.The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs:
33: 29–53.
32.
WedemanAH (2003) From Mao to Market: Rent Seeking, Local Protectionism, and Marketization in China.
Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
33.
WoodsK (2011)
Ceasefire capitalism: Military–private partnerships, resource concessions and military–state building in the Burma–China borderlands.Journal of Peasant Studies38: 747–770.
