Peripheral centers: vertical politics and the geography of Chinese cross-border opium replacement in Southeast Asia’s “New Golden Triangle”

ABSTRACT China’s Opium Replacement Policy (ORP) is one of the country’s earliest cross-border development interventions in the upper Mekong region. A massive state subsidy program for “alternative” development in the northern parts of Myanmar and Laos, the ORP helped finance a wave of Chinese agribusiness investments abroad since the mid-2000s, causing significant social and ecological transformation. Yet key details about the program remain opaque. In this article, we contribute to a growing literature on the rising economic power of China’s “peripheral centers,” borderland prefectures whose role in foreign affairs has increased significantly as the country’s borders become more porous. We review state motives for establishing the ORP and use public records about the program’s activities in Myanmar and Laos to interrogate the vertical politics that structure and complicate the ORP’s implementation. The program’s public records are characterized by a mix of transparency and opacity which we analyse to show that the ORP’s increasing transparency since around 2010 has moved away from regulating impacts abroad and instead toward securing and distributing benefits for borderland business (and their interlinked political) interests in China. As borderland authorities play a growing role in China’s foreign trade, we show that the vertical politics that increasingly shape the regulatory environment have allowed the ORP to proliferate in size and influence as state oversight of its activities abroad has waned.