Resource Cooperation as a Form of Contentious Development in China's Relations with Southeast Asia

• In Event: 149. Chinese Outward Investments in Southeast Asia: Development for Whom? Transformations Where?

Abstract

As a form of production and trade, development cooperation, and its implications for territorial control, natural resource extraction highlights many of the important and controversial roles that China has been assuming in Southeast Asian economies and politics in recent years. Perhaps it is not surprising then that some of the most spectacular expressions of domestic resistance to Chinese economic investment in the region have emerged around resource and energy sector projects. They have included mass demonstrations at the Chinese-backed Letpadaung copper mine and Myitsone hydro-electric dam in Myanmar, unprecedented levels of domestic protest against Chinese petroleum exploration and bauxite mining in Vietnam, and other less spectacular but more perhaps regular examples in Philippines, Cambodia and Indonesia. Yet these demonstrations underline another important underlying reality, which is China’s growing role in resource and energy sector cooperation across Southeast Asia and the significance of these sectors for forging political and economic relations between China and the region. Based on studies in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia, this paper examines how so-called anti-Chinese protest in Southeast Asia reflects a complex convergence factors related to on-going domestic problems with domestic resource governance, internal struggles for political and territorial control within host countries, and new anxieties emerging around the rise of China as a regional hegemon. Reflections for this paper will be based on chapters from a forthcoming multi-authored volume on Chinese resource engagements in Southeast Asia and the author’s own research on this topic in Vietnam.

Author

• Jason Morris-Jung, SIM University