Abstract
The Boten SEZ at the China-Laos border is undergoing major development as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Its story goes back to 2007 when Boten opened as a land concession for a Chinese hotel-casino complex. Yet crime and mismanagement led to its abrupt closure in 2011, when most people left. This chapter is based on research in Boten in 2015-2017, between the zone's first failure and its current boom. After introducing the history of Boten I show how “waiting” for development became an embodied trope for those living in the SEZ throughout this period. Secondly, I engage with the notion of “suspension” as an analytical device to address development zones in the context of China's global ambitions.
Keywords: suspension, BRI, development, SEZ, Boten, Laos
For five years, this remote town on the China-Laos border has lived in the shadow of more prosperous times. […] But Boten's luck may be about to turn once again.
– New York Times, 6 July 2016The two tropes of “boom” and “bust” are recurrent in analyses of frontier capitalism across Asia's borderlands. Liminal spaces par excellence, borderlands seem to experience periods of frenetic (and often illicit) activities, when people move in, fortunes are made, and promises of further development amplified. Often, however, such “boom” phases are followed by a period of government crackdown, or overall decline due to fluctuations in the market. As the “bust” settles in, formerly (and briefly) prosperous outposts turn, once again, into semi-deserted out-of-the-way places, where stories about the “good old days” are subjects of daily conversations. The social sciences literature on Asian borderlands has, indeed, captured a significant variety of such stories of boom-to-bust (cf. Horstmann, Saxer and Rippa 2018; Tsing 2005). In this chapter I contribute to this body of scholarly research by addressing the case of the Boten Special Economic Zone (SEZ), at the Laos-China border. Boten is currently undergoing major development as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Starting in 2017, China Railway, a state-owned enterprise (SOE), set up offices in Boten to manage the construction of the northern Laos section of the China-Laos high-speed railway project. Since then Boten has doubled its size and now features two large office towers, a railway and a bus station, and a new shopping mall. Yet the story of Boten pre-dates the construction of the China-Laos railway and the BRI.