Document Type
Article
Department
Center for Urban and Global Studies
Publication Date
9-2013
Abstract
Integrating with Southeast Asia is a key component of China’s multi-pronged regionalisation around its borders as its global rise continues. Xiangming Chen and Curtis Stone consider the ambition of China’s ‘Go Southwest’ strategy to extend its economic interests and influence into Southeast Asia, and explore how China’s regional assertion reinforces the larger trend of new spatial configurations in light of increasing globalisation. The authors show how simultaneous globalisation and regionalisation unleashes a dual process of de-bordering and re-bordering where the traditional barrier role of borders is yielding more to that of bridges, as small, marginal, and remote border cities and towns become larger centers of trade and tourism. This article examines China’s effort to engage Southeast Asia and many of China’s footprints within and beyond the cities of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Inter-country and intra-regional trade provides the starting point for examining the extent of economic integration in the GMS, and also its unbalanced development.
Comments
Article originally published in European Financial Review, September 2013. http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=7181 Reproduced by the Trinity College Digital Repository with permission of the publisher.