Impact of China's Rise on the Mekong Region.

• Author: Diana, Antonella
• Position: Book review

Impact of China's Rise on the Mekong Region. Edited by Yos Santasombat. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Hardcover: 261pp.

Since 2000, the countries in the Mekong River basin have received a new influx of migrants, traders, small and large scale investors, labourers and professionals from mainland China. In engaging with the Mekong states and societies, Chinese newcomers have contributed to producing significant social, environmental and economic change by establishing cash crop plantations, casino-centred special economic zones, markets and free trade areas, exploiting minerals and building modern infrastructures. Impact of China's Rise on the Mekong Region, edited by Yos Santasombat, is one of the few scholarly works to date that explores the nature of such change.

The book makes an important contribution to understanding these new Chinese-Southeast Asian engagements on numerous counts. First, the essays in the collection are written by Asian scholars--seven of whom are based in academic institutions in Mekong countries and three in Taiwan--and present Asian views in an academic debate about "China's rise" otherwise dominated by American, European or Australian analysts. Second, with contributions from anthropologists, economists, sociologists and a political scientist, the collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to analysing a phenomenon that has mostly been addressed in isolation within disciplines. Third, the chapters provide a geographically variegated overview of changes in each of the Mekong countries focusing on the revival of China's socio-economic and political relations with Vietnam (Chapter 2 by Nguyen Van Chinh), Laos (Chapter 3 by Bien Chiang and Jean Chih-yin Cheng, and Chapter 4 by Pinkaew Laungaramsri), Thailand (Chapter 5 by Aranya Siriphon), Myanmar (Chapter 6 by Khine Tun], and Cambodia (Chapter 7 by Touch Siphat). The new links between China and the other Mekong countries are explained not only in terms of intensified interactions between local state and non-state actors and old and new Chinese migrants, but also in relation to China's internal processes of modernization, supposed political restructuring, economic growth and social engineering (Introduction by Yos), as well as China's foreign geo-economic strategies within regional integration frameworks, such as the Greater Mekong Sub-region initiative and the ASEAN-Plus 1 agreement (Chapter 1 by Hsing-Chou Sung).

Yet, although intending to foreground "the...