Art of Neighbouring

Martin Saxer was a Clarendon scholar at Oxford and received his doctorate in 2010. He conducted extensive fieldwork in Siberia, Tibet and Nepal. He currently leads the ERC Starting Grant project Remoteness & Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World. Juan Zhang is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England in Australia. Her work focuses on cross-border mobilities, and transgressive politics in cross-border encounters. Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.

The Art of Neighbouring addresses a critical gap in existing scholarship on the localized impacts of China’s rise. Through the use of multi-sited and multi-level cases in each of the chapters, it weaves together a rich tapestry of lived experiences that provides nuanced insights into ‘borderworlds’ as loci of Chinese interrelations with its neighbors, and vice versa. - Pichamon Yeophantong, Journal of Chinese Overseas 14 (2018)

• Introduction, Neighbouring in the Borderworlds along China's Frontiers Juan Zhang and Martin Saxer, Chapter 1 Bright Lights Across the River: Competing Modernities at China's Edge Franck Billé Chapter 2 Realms of Free Trade, Enclaves of Order: Chinese-Built 'Instant Cities' in Northern Laos Pál Nyíri Chapter 3 New Roads, Old Trades: Neighbouring China in Northwestern Nepal Martin Saxer Chapter 4 Trading on Change: Bazaars and Social Transformation in the Borderlands of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang Henryk Alff Chapter 5 A World Community of Neighbours in the Making: Resource Cosmopolitics and Mongolia's 'Third Neighbour' Diplomacy Uradyn E. Bulag Chapter 6 The Mobile and the Material in the Himalayan Borderlands Tina Harris Chapter 7 Odd Neighbours: Trans-Himalayan Tibetan Itineraries and Chinese Economic Development Chris Vasantkumar Chapter 8 'China Is Paradise': Fortune and Refuge, Brokers and Partners, or the Migration Trajectories of Burmese Muslims toward the Yunnan Borderlands Renaud Egreteau Chapter 9 Neighbouring in Anxiety along the China-Vietnam Border Juan Zhang Chapter 10 China's Animal Neighbours Magnus Fiskesjö, Bibliography.