Phill Wilcox – författare

This book uses the case of Chinese development in Laos to ask what development is and why it happens as it does.Development may seem self-evidently positive, but it is fraught with different agendas and seemingly competing visions of what so-called developing countries should become and how they should get there. As a country soon to graduate from Least Developed Country status as defined by the United Nations, Laos is a rich case study for considering the shifting drivers and priorities for development. This book considers how the rapid arrival of China has brought visions of development which converge and contest what has gone before, and how these inform individual and collective aspirations on the ground in Laos. This book starts by situating China’s Belt and Road Initiative and development priorities, before going on to consider what the rise of China in Laos really means for agendas of change and for individual aspirations. This book concludes that China is changing ideas of future making and visions of what a developed society looks like, but not yet altering a long-standing preoccupation with the very notion of development itself. Based on many years of original on the ground research in Laos, this book moves beyond macro scholarship on China’s influence to provide a nuanced picture of what Global China means and what development, aspiration, and future building mean in a changing Laos.It will be a thought-provoking read for researchers across the fields of global development and Asian studies.

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is nearly fifty years old, and one of the few surviving one-party socialist states. Nearly five decades on from its revolutionary birth, the Lao population continues to build futures in and around a political landscape that maintains socialist rhetoric on the one hand and capitalist economics on the other. Contemporary Lao politics is marked by the use of cultural heritage as a source of political legitimacy. Researched through long-term detailed ethnography in the former royal capital of Luang Prabang, itself a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage Site since 1995, this book takes a fresh look at issues of legitimacy, heritage, and national identity for different members of the Lao population. It argues that the political system has become sufficiently embedded to avoid imminent risk of collapse but suggests that it is facing new challenges primarily in the form of rising Chinese influence in Laos.

China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations. Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.