Yunnan-A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia: A Case Study of China’s Political and Economic Relations with its Neighbours

Chandos Asian Studies Series: Contemporary Issues and Trends

Yunnan – A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia

A case study of China’s political and economic relations with its neighbours

Tim Summers

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

List of figures and tables

List of abbreviations

Note on use of Chinese

Acknowledgements

About the author

Map of Asia

Yunnan timeline

Yunnan place names in Chinese

Chapter 1: Introduction: why Yunnan?

Abstract:

Previous studies on Yunnan

A provincial case study of China’s political and economic relations

Structure of the book

Chapter 2: China in a changing world

Abstract:

Western China and the global economy

China and its Asian neighbours

Provincial agency in China’s global interactions

Chapter 3: Yunnan’s history in regional perspective

Abstract:

From Dian kingdom to Mongol conquest

From Ming integration to ‘inward rebalancing’ in the Qing

Late Qing decline and European incursions

Reform, revolution and the war period in Yunnan

Yunnan from 1949

Chapter 4: Repositioning Yunnan: ideas and policy

Abstract:

Early ideas of ‘opening up’ in Yunnan

Turning point: 1992

Developing ideas and policy

The ‘great international transit route’ and CAFTA

National belonging

Repositioning continued

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Chapter 5: Yunnan and regional institutions

Abstract:

Early regional engagement: Greater Mekong Subregion

Yunnan and BCIM

New dynamics in the region(s) – CAFTA and a revitalised GMS

Guangxi and regional institutions

Yunnan and domestic regionalism

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Infrastructure development

Abstract:

The early 1990s: limited transport infrastructure

Transport infrastructure in 2001

Further developments: 2006 and beyond

Energy security and infrastructure development

Challenges: politics and international relations

Conclusion

Chapter 7: From border trade to ‘going out’

Abstract:

New trends from 2001

‘Going out’: outward investment from Yunnan

Domestic trade and investment

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Abstract:

Provincial agency and ‘competitive internationalisation’

China, Asia and global political economy

References

Index

Copyright

Chandos Publishing

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First published in 2013.

All data in this book are correct up to April 2012.

ISBN: 978-0-85709-444-5 (print)

ISBN: 978-0-85709-445-2 (online)

Chandos Asian Studies Series ISSN: 1759-5347 (print) and ISSN: 2052-2126 (online)

© T. A. Summers, 2013

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Dedication

To my parents

List of figures and tables

Figures

Map of Asia xix

1.1. Map of Yunnan province 3

2.1. Political map of China 15

3.1. Yunnan Military Academy, Kunming 43

7.1. Yunnan’s border trade, 1984–2011 150

7.2. Yunnan’s border trade as percentage of total trade, and as percentage of trade with Myanmar/Vietnam/Laos, 1988–2010 150

7.3. Yunnan’s total foreign trade, 1980–2011 151

Tables

2.1. Provincial GDP and population in selected years after 1949 14

3.1. Qing dynasty population in Yunnan according to censuses 36

3.2. Official population of Yunnan province by ethnic (minzu) category (millions) 48

5.1. Slogans at the Ninth CAExpo (official English translations) 106

7.1. Examples of outward investment by Yunnan corporations (to end 2010) 161

7.2. Examples of ‘substitute development’ activity by region of origin in Yunnan 167

List of abbreviations

ADB Asian Development Bank

ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

BCIM Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic cooperation forum

CAExpo China-ASEAN trade fair

CAFTA China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement

CCP Chinese Communist Party

dwt dead-weight tonnes

GDP gross domestic product

GMS Greater Mekong Subregion

K2K Kolkata-Kunming forum

km kilometre

KMT Kuomintang (Guomindang or Nationalist Party)

mm millimetre

MRC Mekong River Commission (‘Committee’ prior to 1995)

PLA People’s Liberation Army

PPRD Pan-Pearl River Delta regional grouping

PRC People’s Republic of China

RMB renminbi

WTO World Trade Organization

YASS Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences

Note on use of Chinese

Chinese names and words are spelt using the pinyin system of romanisation in use in the People’s Republic of China, with a few exceptions for historical references or where the non-pinyin version is so familiar that to use pinyin might be confusing. Citations from Chinese-language documents are given in English, using the author’s translations.

Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from the support and assistance of many people and institutions. It emerged from the research I did for my PhD dissertation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for East Asian Studies, and I am grateful to all at the centre for their support and providing me with office space in which to work on this book. I was fortunate to study under Arif Dirlik, who not only gave ready advice but expanded my intellectual horizons in ways I had not expected. Wang Shaoguang’s insights and guidance throughout my research also helped me greatly.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong houses wonderful collections of primary materials and secondary research on contemporary China, and I am grateful to all those who have worked over the years at the Universities Service Centre for China Studies and in the University Library to develop and maintain those collections. There is enough material there for a whole series of books on Yunnan.

I am also grateful for the friendship and hospitality of the many people in China I have got to know during my time working in southwest China and since then. Their contributions to the book are less direct, perhaps, but all the more important for that.

Baohui Zhang, Ben Simpfendorfer and Christoph Steinhardt all read parts of the manuscript and gave me crucial comments and direction. My editorial team at Chandos deserve thanks not only for taking on this project, but for their ready responses to my many queries.

Finally, my family and friends have consistently supported me in this endeavour. Particular thanks go to my wife, Lucy, without whose encouragement this book would not have seen the light of day.

About the author

Tim Summers writes on the politics, economy and international relations of contemporary China. He is a senior consulting fellow with Chatham House in London, teaches at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and advises corporates and investors on China. Tim holds a PhD in Chinese studies from CUHK and an MA from the University of Cambridge. He was British consul-general in Chongqing from 2004 to 2007, when he travelled extensively in southwest China, including in Yunnan.

Map of Asia

Source: CIA Factbook 2008 (accessed through www.mapcruzin.com).

Yunnan timeline

Yunnan place names in Chinese

Anning 安宁

Banhong 班洪

Banlao 班老

Baoshan 保山

Bisezhai 碧色寨

Dali 大理

Daluo 打洛

Dehong 德宏

Dianchi 滇池

Fuxian (Lake) 抚仙

Gejiu 个旧

Gengma 耿马

Guanlei 关累

Hekou 河口

Honghe 红河

Jiangxinpo 江心坡

Jinghong 景洪

Jinping 金平

Jinsha jiang [name for the Yangtze River in Yunnan] 金沙江

Jinshuihe 金水河

Kaiyuan 开远

Kunming 昆明

Lancang jiang (Mekong River) 澜沧江

Lijiang 丽江

Lincang 临沧

Longchuan 陇川

Longling 龙陵

Luguhu 泸沽湖

Luocunkou 罗村口

Lushui 泸水

Malipo 麻栗坡

Mangshi 芒市

Mengding (Qingshuihe) 孟定 (清水河)

Menghai 勐海

Mengla 勐腊

Menglian 孟连

Menglong 勐龙

Mengsong 勐宋

Mengwu 猛乌

Mengyang 勐养

Mile 弥勒

Mohan 磨憨

Mohei 磨黑

Nansan 南伞

Nujiang or Nu River (Salween) 怒江

Pianma 片马

Pingbian 屏边

Pingyuanjie 平远街

Qujing 曲靖

Ruili 瑞丽

Shilin 石林

Shilongba 石龙坝

Shiping 石屏

Shuifu 水富

Simao 思茅

Suijiang 绥江

Tengchong 腾冲

Tianbao 天保

Wanding 畹町

Wenshan 文山

Wude 乌得

Xiaguan 下关

(Xiao) Ganlanba (小)橄榄坝

(Xiao) Mengyang (小)勐养

Xishuangbanna 西双版纳

Xuanwei 宣威

Yingjiang 盈江

Yuanjiang 元江

Yunnan 云南

Yuxi 玉溪

Zhangfeng 章风

Zhanyi 沾益

Zhenkang 镇康

1

Introduction: why Yunnan?

Abstract:

This chapter sets out the focus of and motivation for the book, and how it relates to existing studies of Yunnan province.

Key words

Yunnan

western China

political economy

southeast Asia

south Asia

bridgehead

This book examines the changing role of Yunnan province in structuring relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its Asian neighbours. It traces a dynamic process through which Yunnan is being repositioned from a southwestern periphery of the PRC to become a Chinese ‘bridgehead’ to southeast and south Asia. Since the early 1990s this process has found expression in the intertwining of ideas, policy frameworks, participation in regional institutions, infrastructure development and trade and investment. While this book is about Yunnan, it also demonstrates the extent of provincial agency in global interactions in reform-era China, changes in China’s economic geography and the growing importance of China’s economic and commercial interactions with its neighbours in southeast and south Asia.

My own interest in this topic was stimulated by numerous visits to Yunnan in the early 2000s, when I was based in the municipality of Chongqing, to Yunnan’s northwest. In particular, I heard plenty from government officials in the province about Yunnan’s membership of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), a forum for the promotion of economic and commercial integration between the five countries of the southeast Asian peninsula and southwest China. This led me to think about what Yunnan’s role in this organisation meant for China’s international relations.

A main motivation for this book is to examine China’s changing political and economic interactions with its Asian neighbours from the perspective of a province, rather than that of the capital, Beijing. This approach is particularly fruitful in Yunnan. One of the features of the province is its shared 4,060 km land border with three of China’s Asian neighbours, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar (or Burma¹). Yunnan is land-locked (Figure 1.1), and so this land border – rather than the sea – provides its access to the rest of the region.

Figure 1.1 Map of Yunnan province Source: www.chinaplanner.com.

When you travel to Yunnan’s border regions, the proximity of these southeast Asian neighbours becomes apparent. In Malipo county, for example, evidence of Vietnam’s proximity can be seen through public use of Vietnamese script alongside Chinese. When I was further down the border with Vietnam in Guangxi (the province to the southeast of Yunnan), a local labour exchange was offering training in Vietnamese for migrant workers who had been forced to return home in 2009 after the global financial crisis hit Chinese industry. In southern Yunnan’s Jinghong, I sat in cafés listening to Thai pop music and eating Thai cuisine ordered from a menu written in both English and Thai, but not Chinese, while traders from Myanmar and the wider region plied their wares in shops along the main street.

Diversity is a hallmark of Yunnan, and it is the province’s geographical, cultural, biological and ethnic diversity which has been the focus of much outside interest and provides rich material for study. For example, Xishuangbanna, the prefecture in the province’s south where Jinghong is located, is home to more than 5,000 plant types, constituting one-sixth of the national total, and over 50 protected animal species, around a third of the national total.

Away from the subtropical climate of Jinghong, up in the north of Yunnan, paths wind up into snow-covered mountains and on to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. It is from here that some of Asia’s largest rivers fall, plummeting through steep valleys in Yunnan to flow through southeast Asia and into the South China Sea. One of these, the Mekong – called the Lancang inside China’s borders – gave its name to the GMS forum, and we will return to this in Chapter 5.

But it is perhaps Yunnan’s ethnic diversity which has garnered most interest, and drawn in many of the tourists who visit this province. My own first visit was in the summer of 1999. Like many others from within China and overseas, I went not just to the provincial capital Kunming, but also to Dali and Lijiaxng, two cities known both for their beautiful natural surroundings and for the minority groups which have lived there for centuries.

Indeed, Yunnan has a reputation as being a ‘museum of human races’ (Scott, 2009: 8), reflecting a long and complex history of migrations through the mountainous terrain which covers some five-sixths of the province’s land area. The 1950s saw a coordinated government and academic project to categorise the various ‘nationalities’, or what have become known as ethnicities, resident in the newly established PRC, based on Stalinist criteria of common language, territory, economic activity and culture, as well as on historical categories inherited from the pre-twentieth-century Ming and Qing dynasties. The project prompted some 400 groups from Yunnan alone to apply for recognition, though the number was whittled down in the 1950s to 55 categories across the PRC (including the Han majority); a fifty-sixth category – from Yunnan as it happens – was added in 1979.²

Unlike some other provinces in western China, however, Yunnan has not been designated an ‘autonomous minority region’, the term used since the 1950s to describe five of China’s provinces, including Yunnan’s provincial neighbour, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Even though it houses significant numbers of 25 of the PRC’s 55 official minority peoples (and small numbers of most of the others), no one group was large or dominant enough to be a basis for Yunnan to have been made an autonomous region. Today Yunnan’s minorities do not actually dominate the province’s population: the majority Han Chinese account for two-thirds of the 45 million registered population, although, as noted in Chapter 3, this has not always been the case.

From the late 1950s through the Cultural Revolution was a bad time for many of these groups, as ‘class struggle’ and efforts to homogenise society meant the marginalisation and destruction of many diverse cultural and religious practices. Following China’s reforms of the late 1970s the policy emphasis shifted again, not just to an acceptance of cultural difference but to its commercial exploitation through the development of tourist and cultural industries which promoted – and commodified – the ways of life of many of these groups. This was a major feature of development in Yunnan, and since then tourism has been big business.

Discussion of these issues of culture and ethnicity dominates the literature on Yunnan (Bossen, 2002; Chang, 2006; Litzinger, 2000; Harrell, 1995; Miller, 1994; Mueggler, 2001; chapters in Rossabi, 2004; Walsh, 2001; Weng, 2006; Wu, 1990), and a stream of anthropological writing about Yunnan has emerged, perhaps in turn contributing to the creation of dominant perceptions of it as an ‘ethnic minority’ province. A lot of this writing takes as its context questions of the relations between the (Han) state and (minority) society within the PRC. Others have increasingly put the study of these minority groups in a wider regional context and explored their connections across the PRC’s borders, or examined the social and cultural similarities between societies from southwest China through upland southeast Asia to India’s northeast.³

Previous studies on Yunnan

The scope for writing on these topics is still substantial, but it is not Yunnan’s diversity or ethnic minorities which are the focus here. Instead, this book examines Yunnan’s role in structuring China’s political and economic relations with its neighbours, in particular by looking into the changing stances taken by provincial elites to these relationships. My approach is influenced by a number of different academic disciplines, but overall is closest to global political