When borders lie within: ethnic marriages and illegality on the Sino-Vietnamese border

• In Event: Immigration and the Transformation of Chinese Society

Abstract

This paper examines the changing geopolitical realities, which redefine the nature of sovereign governance on the Sino-Vietnamese border. The binary forms of classification in a rigidly and clearly delimited Sino-Vietnamese borderland replace the ambiguous space of ‘zomia’ with its fluid and overlapping identifications. This dynamic context sets the conditions for local communities and their long-standing tradition of ethnic marriages straddling the borders of China and its neighbouring states. In order to understand how and why the status of the earlier accepted forms of undocumented ethnic marriages has recently changed from ‘common’ (shishi) to ‘illegal’ (feifa) in two ethnic Yao villages, I look at how state discourses on marriage migration in Asia, biopolitical concerns about population security in China and regional iterations of the global anti-human trafficking campaign come into play in forceful ways to shape the geopolitical regime of the Sino-Vietnamese borderland, redefine the terms of legitimate practices, thus reconfiguring ethnic marriages as illegal.

Author

• Elena Barabantseva, University of Manchester