Juliet Lu
https://julietlu.com/
I am a political ecologist who focuses on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources across the world.
Supervisors: Nancy Lee Peluso, Kathryn DeMaster, Louise Fortmann, and You-Tien Hsing
I am a political ecologist who focuses on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources across the world.
Supervisors: Nancy Lee Peluso, Kathryn DeMaster, Louise Fortmann, and You-Tien Hsing
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region – predominantly rubber companies – instead of targeting opium producers directly. Rubber is not, however, economically or ecologically speaking, an optimal replacement for opium. Rubber and opium have contrasting production cycles and market characteristics, and are grown at different altitudes by different types of producers (large corporations and smallholders, respectively). Due to this apparent mismatch, critics have dismissed the ORP’s opium eradication aims, viewing it as a pretext for land grabs. I argue instead that rubber makes sense as an opium replacement crop based on Chinese and Lao state views that opium is a symptom of weak state control and underdevelopment in the borderlands and rubber a tried and true modernising crop. I thus offer that the ORP attempts replacement by displacement – not necessarily by physically replacing opium fields with rubber plantations, but rather by drawing land and labour into rubber, away from opium.
victims or colluders. But foreign land investments are often forged through fragmented relations of state
power which investors struggle to navigate. For example, over the last decade, Chinese companies have
been granted contracts to develop vast agribusiness concessions in Laos. These areas, however, rarely
come under full Chinese company control. To understand this gap between how much land the Lao
government grants and what investors actually obtain, this article investigates seven Chinese agribusiness
concessions. In each case, tropes of Laos as having abundant ‘empty’ lands ripe for investment were used
by the Lao government to attract investors, and by investors to justify their projects. These tropes reflect
the territorial sensibilities of states and investors alike, while erasing existing users and land use systems,
and masking the complex politics behind land regulations of which investors are largely ignorant. We thus
abandon the concept of weak governance for that of fragmented sovereignty and suggest that, rather
than leaving host countries open to land grabs and subject to investor demands as is often assumed, the
fragmented state can sometimes strategically impede the influx of global capital.
region – predominantly rubber companies – instead of targeting opium producers directly. Rubber is not, however, economically or ecologically speaking, an optimal replacement for opium. Rubber and opium have contrasting production cycles and market characteristics, and are grown at different altitudes by different types of producers (large corporations and smallholders, respectively). Due to this apparent mismatch, critics have dismissed the ORP’s opium eradication aims, viewing it as a pretext for land grabs. I argue instead that rubber makes sense as an opium replacement crop based on Chinese and Lao state views that opium is a symptom of weak state control and underdevelopment in the borderlands and rubber a tried and true modernising crop. I thus offer that the ORP attempts replacement by displacement – not necessarily by physically replacing opium fields with rubber plantations, but rather by drawing land and labour into rubber, away from opium.
victims or colluders. But foreign land investments are often forged through fragmented relations of state
power which investors struggle to navigate. For example, over the last decade, Chinese companies have
been granted contracts to develop vast agribusiness concessions in Laos. These areas, however, rarely
come under full Chinese company control. To understand this gap between how much land the Lao
government grants and what investors actually obtain, this article investigates seven Chinese agribusiness
concessions. In each case, tropes of Laos as having abundant ‘empty’ lands ripe for investment were used
by the Lao government to attract investors, and by investors to justify their projects. These tropes reflect
the territorial sensibilities of states and investors alike, while erasing existing users and land use systems,
and masking the complex politics behind land regulations of which investors are largely ignorant. We thus
abandon the concept of weak governance for that of fragmented sovereignty and suggest that, rather
than leaving host countries open to land grabs and subject to investor demands as is often assumed, the
fragmented state can sometimes strategically impede the influx of global capital.