rongsheng gong state street pricelist

Alexander Otto owns a stake in Otto Group and is majority shareholder and CEO of ECE Group, a commercial real estate firm focused on shopping centers.

In this article, we examine the modern Chinese state’s efforts to consolidate control over land and people in its southwest borderlands via the development and expansion of large-scale rubber plantations.* We examine these efforts via the lenses of the changes that occurred in the political, economic, and sociocultural life-worlds of certain indigenous Akha communities in post-1980s Yunnan, China, as they passively and actively responded to these state initiatives, all the while transitioning from shifting subsistence rice to sedentary cash-crop rubber cultivators.

On the one hand, this particular case is a fairly predictable outcome of broader sets of processes occurring in other resource frontiers in Asia and beyond as part of the last great state enclosure (Tsing 2005; Scott 2009; Peluso and Lund 2011; Li 2014). A key dynamic of these changes is the rapid growth and expansion of boom crops, including rubber (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011). Jefferson Fox and J. C. Castella predict that “by 2050, the area of land (in southwest China and Mainland Southeast Asia) dedicated to rubber trees could quadruple, largely replacing lands now occupied by evergreen broadleaf trees and swidden-related secondary vegetation” (2013, 155).

On the other hand, our findings reveal that resource frontiers, not unlike borders as discussed by Harlan Koff (2013, 11), are complex and dynamic spaces where one often encounters a diversity of distinct actors, objects, and practices at play that actively affect larger political systems and projects. Here we highlight the roles of certain Akha actors in shaping and reshaping new and emerging resource frontiers in ways that afford them some autonomy from the state while further entrapping them in new forms of state-, market-, and climate-driven controls and vulnerabilities (Chatterjee 2004; Appadurai 2013; Krupa and Nugent 2015).

These increased cash incomes, however, brought about many new social problems, such as more conspicuous and competitive displays of consumption and feasting, widespread gambling, rising rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug dependencies, rising intergenerational tensions, and prostitution. These changes also impacted traditional Akha religio-cultural systems or Ancestral practices in expected and unexpected ways.[1] Rising cash incomes along with these social problems all served, on the one hand, to further undermine Akha Ancestral practices that were already severely undermined by the state in pre-reform-era China while, on the other hand, providing an opportunity for certain Akha communities in post-reform-era China to selectively (re)vitalize some of those Ancestral practices, in part as a means of promoting their “survival through culture” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 24).

Traditionally, there were forest buffer zones between the lowland Dai and the numerous highlanders surrounding the basins. It was in these very buffer zones that the Chinese state first began to establish state rubber farms in the 1950s. Since the flat lowlands were comprised of permanent paddy fields, the state’s expansion of these early rubber farms was achieved by appropriating large amounts of the most cherished fallow lands of swidden fields below 800 meters above sea level.[3] As a result, highland farmers were forced to farm on less desirable lands either at higher altitudes or on greater degrees of slope.

Another consequence of the state’s establishment and expansion of rubber farms in Xishuangbanna was a major demographic shift in local ethnoscapes. In 1949, there were only 5,000 Han in Xishuangbanna. From roughly the 1950s onward, however, the local Han population progressively soared to 17,905 in 1956, 185,894 in 1982, and 340,431 in 2010, comprising 6.9 percent, 28.3 percent, and 30.03 percent of the total population respectively.[4] Most of the early Han migrants were brought into Xishuangbanna from other parts of China to work on the state rubber farms. At present, Han are the largest ethnic group in Xishuangbanna. In contrast, the local Dai population, which used to be the majority, is now the second largest ethnic group in the region, comprising 27.89 percent of the total population in 2010. Akha are currently the third largest ethnic group behind the Han and Dai, comprising 19 percent of the total population in 2010.

The Akha, a Tibeto-Burman-speaking group, are one of the largest upland groups in the Upper Mekong Region, with an estimated population of seven hundred thousand people (Wang, Rongsheng, and Sorchampa 2014).[5] Until recently, Akha livelihoods in the larger region were based primarily in swidden agriculture, especially subsistence rice. Since the 1980s, however, Akha have experienced significant changes in their livelihoods as a result of the region’s ongoing, albeit uneven and contested, transition from battlefields to markets (Li 2013; Morton 2013, 2015; Sturgeon 2005, 2010, 2012; Tooker 2004, 2012; Wang 2013). In Xishuangbanna, most Akha villagers are now rubber farmers. In addition, since the early 2000s some Akha from Xishuangbanna have played key roles in driving the current rubber booms in neighboring Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand from below (Shi 2008; Sturgeon 2010).

The large-scale development of rubber plantations in China first began in the 1950s when the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC) started to promote domestic rubber cultivation in the intertwined interests of national security, defense building, and industrial growth (Yunnan Agricultural Reclamation Cooperation Ltd. and Yunnan Association of Tropical Crops 2005).[6] The state focused its efforts to develop self-sufficiency in rubber production in its two largest tropical frontiers of Hainan Island and Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, where it established numerous state rubber farms in the 1950s.[7]

In this article, we focus on Xishuangbanna, a mountainous frontier region in far southwest China that has long been dominated by non-Han ethnic groups whose livelihoods, with the exception of lowland Dai rice cultivators, were largely based on upland swidden cultivation until roughly the 1980s. These non-Han ethnic groups only recently became “ethnic minorities” in this area as a result of two intertwined factors—the heightened direct presence of the central Chinese state and the large-scale influx of Han migrants from other parts of China. In this context, state officials saw rubber trees as the perfect crop to consolidate control over local natural resources and people.

In order to achieve these grand directives, however, state officials had to transform what was apperceived as the “primitive,” “illegible,” and “unproductive” practice of swidden cultivation into the “modern,” “legible,” and “productive” practice of sedentary rubber cultivation (Scott 1998; Xu 2006). State officials further sought to gradually transform what were apperceived as “backward” and “unaccountable” local non-Han ethnics into “modern” and “accountable” laborers of the state. It would take the state nearly half a century to effectively eliminate swidden cultivation via numerous top-down policies and initiatives, including an outright ban on swidden cultivation in 1998. As a result, many non-Han ethnic farmers in Xishuangbanna were transformed into “modern” rubber-producing subjects of the state.

These non-Han farmers, however, were eventually so successful in developing private rubber plantations, especially post-1984, that the total area of their holdings surpassed that of the state farms in 2004 (Xishuangbanna Statistics Bureau 2004). Some of these smallholders, particularly certain ethnic Dai (Tai-Lue) and Akha residing along China’s borders with northwest Laos and east Myanmar, have successfully outsourced the development of rubber plantations to Laos and Myanmar since China joined the World Treaty Organization (WTO) in 2001 (Shi 2008; Sturgeon 2010). Janet Sturgeon argues that the proliferation of these smallholder rubber plantations within and beyond Xishuangbanna led to the creation of “chaotic landscapes” neither expected by states nor under their direct control (2012, 123–25).

During the period when the state established rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna (1950s to early 1960s), most of the farm managers and workers were either transferred Han soldiers or Han farmers from other parts of China, especially Hunan province. Local ethnic minorities were excluded from such work as they were deemed “backward” and of “low quality” for more “advanced” kinds of labor such as rubber cultivation (Xu 2006; Sturgeon 2010). At the same time, however, the state required these ethnic minorities to produce the food necessary to sustain the mostly ethnic Han workforce in not only rubber but also steel production.

Eventually, however, the state found that its rubber farms were not able to supply enough rubber to meet the nation’s rising demand. The state further realized that it could not continue to endlessly expand its rubber plantations due to both a lack of “advanced” Han labor and also the fact that most of the suitable land was being used, albeit from the state’s perspective “underutilized” or “wasted,” by “uncivilized” ethnic-minority shifting cultivators. From the vantage of state officials, the best way to solve these problems was to replace swidden lands with rubber plantations and thereby transform local minorities into rubber farmers. This strategy, it was envisioned, would allow the state to not only consolidate control over local natural resources and people but to also produce more rubber with no direct cost to the state.

As a result, in 1964 the Ministry of Agricultural Reclamation ordered state farms in Yunnan to assist local governments in developing min ying xiang jiaoor “peoples’ rubber plantations.” In the same year, the first collective rubber plantation was established at Jinglan village near Jinghong City. These initial efforts to develop and expand “peoples’ rubber plantations,” however, were halted amid the turmoil and upheaval of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Thereafter, in 1980, the central government sent another order to continue rubber expansion in Yunnan. The Yunnan Provincial Government responded by requesting that state farms either incorporate local villagers and their lands into their operations or allocate 6 percent of their total profits to the development of more “peoples’ rubber plantations,” especially by giving interest-free loans to local farmers to develop such plantations (Li 1988).

This new policy promoted the development of two kinds of “peoples’ rubber plantations” in Jinghong City that were either collectively or jointly operated. In the meantime, many local Akha villagers and their lands were directly incorporated into previously established state farms in Mengla County. Collective plantations were developed with interest-free loans and technical support from the state farms. In actuality, however, while these collective plantations were officially categorized as “peoples’ rubber plantations,” they were in fact run by local county or township-level governments and thus functioned as an extension of the state farms. The key difference between these collective plantations and the state farms was that the latter were run by higher levels of government at provincial and national levels.

The state farms were further mandated to develop jointly operating (lian ying) rubber plantations with local villages. These joint-enterprises involved state farms providing rubber tree seedlings and technical support to villagers, with the latter providing their land and labor. The profits were then shared by the state farm and villagers according to either a 30/70 or 40/60 scheme.

Finally, in 1984 another type of “peoples’ rubber plantation” came into being, that of the privately owned rubber plantation. Earlier, in 1982–1983, the state began to contract out what was recategorized as “agricultural land” to individual households according to the central policy of the Household Contract Responsibility System (HCRS,jiating lianchan chengbao zherenzhi). It was on these lands that the earliest “true” private plantations came into being.

State officials perceived these “legible” and “productive” plantations as a much more desirable alternative to the “illegible” and “unproductive” swidden lands of ethnic minorities (Huang et al. 2005; Xu 2006). As in the case of jointly operated plantations, the state provided interest-free loans to individual households to develop private plantations.

State officials, however, never intended for small-holder rubber farmers to outperform state farms in rubber production. The central government intended rather that state farms would play the dominant role in rubber production with supplemental input from smallholders’ plantations beyond state farms (Li 1998). The central government similarly never expected to lose direct control over these smallholders and their rubber ventures within and beyond China. Notwithstanding these intentions and expectations, the total area of “peoples’ rubber plantations” in Xishuangbanna eventually surpassed that of the state farms in 2004. In addition, by the 2000s, nearly all of the “peoples’ rubber plantations” initially developed under collective enterprise and jointly operated schemes were privatized and distributed among individual households.

A key part of state efforts to transform Xishuangbanna into a rubber-producing frontier involved concerted efforts by state officials to eradicate shifting cultivation and relocate highland communities from higher to lower elevations deemed ideal for rubber cultivation. State strategies to achieve these intertwined goals went through several stages.

First, during the communal period (1958 to the early 1980s) many highland villages were forcibly relocated from higher to lower slopes. In 1967, Arka village—the main case study highlighted in this article—was relocated to a lower slope and merged with another relocated Akha village to form a “production team” near its current location. The villagers were then relocated again to their present location in 1971 due to the state’s decision to construct a reservoir at the previous location.

The second major strategy pursued by state officials to eradicate shifting cultivation involved the establishment and expansion of state rubber farms, and, later, collective and jointly operated “peoples’ rubber plantations” beyond state farms as discussed earlier. Importantly, these plantations were largely established on the fallow swidden lands of local ethnic minorities via a process of land encroachment and dispossession. For example, one of the state’s largest rubber plantations—Dongfeng State Farm, which was established in 1958—encroached on Arka village’s traditional territory and swallowed up its closest and most fertile swidden lands. Arka village elders informed Wang that during the 1960s and early 1970s, whichever land they had turned to fallow in that area was seized by the state and planted with rubber trees.

As a result, Arka villagers were forced to move their swidden agriculture to more marginal lands at higher elevations and with deeper degrees of slope. Much of these lands, however, were now located some two to three hours by foot, then the main means of transportation, from the village’s new location. Later, in the early 1980s, the state appropriated more of Arka’s traditional swidden lands to establish a collective plantation called Xiaojie Plantation Farm. In addition, from 1982 to 1984 roughly 300 mu (20 ha) of rubber plantations were developed on Arka’s swidden lands as part of a jointly operating “peoples’ rubber plantation” established by Arka villagers with assistance from Dongfeng State Farm. In short, all of these initiatives greatly reduced the amount of Arka’s swidden lands.

The state’s final grand strategies to eliminate shifting cultivation took shape in the domains of policy and law, namely the Household Contract Responsibility System (HCRS) introduced in the early 1980s, and a 1998 ban on logging and shifting cultivation. Under the HCRS all agrarian households in China were allocated certain amounts of land recategorized as “agricultural land.” The HCRS indirectly worked to curtail or contain shifting cultivation by constraining it to these very limited areas of land recategorized as agricultural lands.

In the case of Arka village, the transition from swidden rice to more sedentary cash-crops, especially rubber, occurred primarily in response to the implementation of the HCRS, long before the 1998 logging ban.[9] In 1983, each Arka villager was allocated 11 mu (.73 ha) of swidden lands according to the HCRS. This land was dispersed in four plots, which were allowed for rice cultivation with a rotational period of six years. This only allowed for five fallow years, however, which is not a healthy rotational period and thus unsustainable. As a result, Arka villagers were compelled to find alternatives to shifting cultivation. The villagers largely found these alternatives in rubber, which they gradually, albeit reluctantly, adopted with early assistance from the same state farm that had earlier encroached on much of their most cherished swidden lands.

As mentioned earlier, the first rubber plantation in Arka village was a collective one developed at Banoin the early 1980s under the government’s joint-operation scheme and with assistance from Dongfeng State Farm.[10] Later, in 1985 and 1986 the state encouraged individual households in Arka to grow privately owned rubber trees on a small plot of redistributed collective land (see figure 1). This initial attempt to encourage private rubber planting, however, was not very successful for several reasons. First, the villagers lacked confidence in what was for them a new crop. Second, they had not yet acquired technical expertise in rubber cultivation. Last, the plot they received for planting was too small to be given enough input.

The final wave of rubber plantation development in Arka occurred in 2006 at a site called Bada. Bada was traditionally a part of Arka’s swidden lands. In the early 1980s, however, the state declared Bada a “state forest.” Later, however, a neighboring Dai village applied for state permission to use Badafor rubber cultivation, claiming that they had far fewer rubber holdings when compared to other local villages. In order to prevent this from happening, however, Arka’s village leaders submitted a counter-request to claim Bada, asserting that Bada was their traditional swidden land. In order to avoid any unwanted inter-village and ethnic conflicts over land, the local government approved both of the applications and split the total land area between the two villages.

During fieldwork we learned that many of the local farmers in Arka and beyond engage in a range of everyday practices via which they strive to not merely evade the state (Scott 1985) but also engage the state and, to a certain degree, see and act like the state in ways that afford them some autonomy over their lands and livelihoods, albeit by working within and around newly imposed state regimes of regulation and control (Scott 1998; Trouillot 2001, 132; Chatterjee 2004; Appadurai 2013; Krupa and Nugent 2015). The three areas we discuss in the following paragraphs focus on the varied agencies of villagers in response to state initiatives to reshape agrarian landscapes and communities in a more “legible,” “controllable,” and “taxable” fashion.

First, since 1999 the central government had worked to curb the “uncontrolled” development of private rubber plantations, partly due to rising environmental concerns. Local officials, however, largely failed to prevent villagers from expanding their private plantations on not only their own contracted lands but also on state “forests” or “wastelands.” Collectively, villagers were generally effective in employing various state discourses to justify their applications for permission to cultivate rubber on state-appropriated lands. This was the case of Bada,as mentioned. Individual households were also able to use their personal connections or guanxi with local officials to obtain permission to grow rubber in state forests.

Many other villagers, however, circumvented the local authorities altogether and, in the eyes of the state, “encroached” on “state forests” in expanding their rubber holdings. In the case of Arka, since nearly all of the village’s cultivable lands were planted with rubber trees by 2006, any household wanting to expand its rubber holdings had to do so on state-appropriated lands, whether licitly or illicitly. Ironically, rubber trees, a new crop that the state intentionally employed to consolidate control over local resources and people, were eventually used by those local actors to maintain some autonomy from the state.

Second, Arka villagers engaged in outright acts of “theft” from the state farms and their workers until the mid-1990s. Akha and other indigenous communities generally disliked the state farms in their early stages of development as they had encroached on and appropriated large amounts of their Ancestral lands. In retaliation, villagers often stole various items, especially chickens, vegetables, and rubber from the state farms, leading to conflicts with state farmers that occasionally led to violence. These acts of theft subsided in the late 1990s as local rubber farmers began tapping their rubber trees for the first time. Prior to that time, the local farmers were struggling to survive and pay for rising costs of food, education, and healthcare.

Another area of state-society praxis that is more akin to state evasion is that of the general tendency for local farmers in Xishuangbanna to underreport their rubber holdings and profits as well as their profits from other economic activities to the local government (and scholars such as ourselves) in order to reduce or avoid real or potential state taxation. For example, in 2006 Wang conducted a survey of smallholder’s rubber holdings in Arka. The villagers reported a total of 7,180 mu (479 ha) of rubber plantations. The village headman later informed Wang, however, that in actuality the villagers collectively owned at least 10,000 mu (667 ha) of rubber plantations. If the village headman is correct, then the villagers underreported their rubber holdings to Wang by about 30 percent. These practices of “state evasion” can be seen as “everyday forms of peasant resistance” (Scott 1985, 298).

In the remainder of this article we discuss some of the many sociocultural changes that occurred in Arka village in conjunction with the political and economic transformations discussed earlier, namely the heightened presence of the state and a transition from shifting agriculture centered on subsistence rice to more sedentary agriculture centered on cash-crop rubber. In brief, rubber plantations dramatically transformed not only the local ecology but also the entire social fabric of rubber-producing villages in Xishuangbanna.

During the Mao era, the state overtly suppressed many of the Ancestral practices of Akha and other ethnic minorities in Xishuangbanna. These state-sponsored acts of religio-cultural suppression extended to Akha religio-cultural ecologies, according to which certain forests were designated as sacred (in Akha yawhawr) and thus taboo to encroach on. Akha generally believed that those who dared to encroach on these sacred sites would bring upon themselves and their households the wrath of the “invisible spirits” or naevq dwelling therein.

Amid their dramatic transition to a rubber-based economy, Arka villagers managed to preserve about 3000 mu (200 ha) of communal forests in a mountainous area located adjacent to state forests. Although these lands were once cleared for swidden rice cultivation in 1990 and 1991 in response to a food shortage, the forests have since been allowed to fully regenerate. In spite of their constant efforts to encroach on state forests, not a single villager ever encroached on these communal forests without first gaining permission to do so from the village authorities.

When asked about their willingness to encroach on “state forests,” villagers informed us that these so-called “state forests” were actually “our forests for many generations before the state came and claimed them” in the early 1980s. From this perspective, they were simply using land that was rightfully theirs to begin with. In a similar vein, the villagers stressed that they were able to preserve what remained of their communal forests as these remained under their direct control and ownership.

A second factor behind the emergence of these inequities was a result of governmental land reforms in the early 1980s. For various reasons, these reforms, which led to the appropriation and distribution of upland areas recategorized as either “state forests” or “agricultural land,” excluded large tracts of upland areas that were left unidentified, unmanageable, and thus “illegible” from the state’s vantage point. In Arka, the new village leadership that emerged in the post-commune period abused its authority and took advantage of these land reform gaps to claim these “unidentified” lands as their own private property.

In addition, as Arka moved to an economy largely based on cash-crop rubber, the village began to experience a variety of new and emerging chronic health problems, such as diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia, that are directly and indirectly related to rubber and its profits. Several doctors from local clinics informed Wang that, in comparison to a neighboring Akha village, Arka villagers tend to exhibit poorer overall health. These doctors attribute Arka villagers’ poorer health conditions to their main source of potable water, which, until recently, was being contaminated by chemical pesticides and herbicides used in rubber cultivation on their main watershed. Prior to the early 1990s, the watershed was reserved as a communal forest. In contrast, the neighboring village draws its potable water directly from preserved state forests that serve as the watershed for a local reservoir. In recent years, four deformed infants were born in Arka. These deformities might be due to the contaminated water source.

Prior to the 1980s, Akha generally considered a woman’s marriage into a local Han household as signifying a move up the social ladder. At that time, the status of state farmers, which were predominantly Han, was considered higher than that of peasant farmers, such as the Akha. In that time period, five women from Arka married into the nearby Han village of state farm workers. In contrast, there was not a single case of a Han marrying into Arka.

Since that time, however, the pattern has reversed and intensified as some ten Han men and six Han women have married into Arka. The main period of transition in these trends was the late 1990s when Arka villagers began tapping their private rubber trees and cashing in on the regional rubber boom. Since that time, not a single Arka villager has married into the nearby state farm. Peasant farmers with private rubber holdings are now considered wealthier and of higher status than state farmers (Sturgeon 2010).

In addition, the market price of dried rubber tends to fluctuate dramatically. For example, for a few days in May 2008 the price soared to 26 yuan/kg and thereafter rapidly dropped to just 7 yuan/kg for the remainder of the year.[16] That dramatic slump can be partially attributed to the 2008 Wall Street crisis, which negatively affected global rubber prices. After accounting for their income loss due to the powdery mildew infection, in 2008 Arka villagers lost roughly one-third of their prior year’s income due to the global economic depression.

When asked what they might do if another epidemic occurred the following year, most of the respondents replied that they were unsure what they would do and simply hoped that it would not happen again. Many believed that the local government would take some measure to prevent the epidemic from happening again as “the state farms have many more rubber plantations than us.” These comments reveal that local farmers are not yet aware of the fact that collectively they now have more rubber holdings than the state. Some villagers suggested that if the epidemic happened again, they would search for non-farming work in towns and cities. Finally, two households noted that they would try and make up for their rubber losses by focusing on other forms of household production, such as pig husbandry.

Rubber was a key technology via which the modern Chinese state sought to consolidate control over what were apperceived as “primitive,” “unproductive,” and “illegible” land and people in its southwestern borderlands. In this article, we examined this grand project of the state from below, via the lenses of certain Akha communities in post-1980s Yunnan, China, that experienced a dramatic shift in their livelihoods from shifting to more sedentary agriculture—from subsistence rice to cash-crop rubber—in response to the heightened local presence of the central Chinese state. We argued that this livelihood shift, while initially a largely passive response on the part of Akha to the state, was, at later times, more actively driven by Akha from below as they sought to maintain some autonomy from the state by working within and around a range of newly imposed state regimes of regulation and control.

This particular case is a fairly predictable outcome of broader sets of processes occurring in other resource frontiers in Asia and beyond as a part of the last great state enclosure (Tsing 2005; Scott 2009; Peluso and Lund 2011; Li 2014). A key dynamic of these changes is the rapid growth and expansion of boom crops, including rubber (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011). At the same time, however, the Akha case brings attention to the fact that resource frontiers, not unlike borders as described by Koff (2013, 11), are complex and dynamic spaces where one often encounters a diversity of distinct actors, objects, and practices at play that actively affect larger political systems and projects.

In this vein, we highlighted the agencies of local Akha actors in shaping and reshaping new and emerging rubber/resource frontiers in a manner that variably affords them some autonomy while entangling them in new forms of state-, market-, and climate-driven controls and vulnerabilities (Chatterjee 2004; Appadurai 2013; Krupa and Nugent 2015). We also examined the impacts of these political and economic transformations, namely the heightened presence of the state and a shift from subsistence rice to cash-crop rubber, on local ecologies and the sociocultural life-worlds of peasant rubber farmers in southwest China. In conclusion, this particular case generally supports the argument that in places, such as southwest China, where the state provides some “land rights and support services” to smallholders, “rubber cultivation is viable and profitable” (Fox and Castella 2013, 157), even as it tends to bring about new and emerging forms of external control and vulnerabilities.

Micah F. Morton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, USA. Morton’s research focuses on borders and transnationalism, state-minority relations, social movements, religious and spiritual ecologies, religion and politics, ethnicity and nationalism, and the politics of Indigeneity in Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China. Recent publications include “From Hill Tribes to Indigenous Peoples: The Localization of a Global Movement in Thailand” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2019, co-authored with Ian G. Baird), “Reframing the Boundaries of Indigeneity: State-Based Ontologies and Assertions of Distinction and Compatibility in Thailand” in American Anthropologist (2017), and “The Rising Politics of Indigeneity in Southeast Asia” in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies’ Trends series (2017).

7. At this time the state also took control over a number of private rubber plantations that were established earlier between 1904 and 1950 by certain local elite.

9. In other parts of Xishuangbanna with more abundant highland areas, shifting cultivation continued until the 1998 logging ban, after which swidden lands were converted to cash-crop plantations, such as tea, with state subsidies via the Land Conversion Program (2001–2002).

Cold Injury Investigation Office of Agricultural Reclamation Bureau of Yunnan Province. 2005. “Yun Nan Ken Qu 1975–1976 Nian Dong Xiang Jiao Shu Han Hai Diao Cha Zong Jie Bao Gao” [Reports on cold injury on state rubber farms in Yunnan in winter of 1975–1976]. In Yun Nan Re Dai Bei Yuan Gao Hai Ba Zhi Jiao De Li Lun Yu Shi Jian[Theories and practices of rubber plantations at tropical north edges and high altitudes of Yunnan], 112–90. Kunming:Yunnan Agricultural Reclamation Cooperation Ltd. and Yunnan Association of Tropical Crops.

Koff, Harlan. 2013. “Putting ‘Power’ into Borderland Studies: ‘Bringing the State Back In.’” In Theorizing Borders through Analyses of Power Relationships, edited by Peter Gilles, Harlan Koff, Carmen Maganda, and Christian Schulz, 9–28. Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0352-6311-4/3

Krupa, Christoper, and David Nugent, eds. 2015. State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812291070

———. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxkn7ds

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42 (1): 125–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9_5

Wang, Jianhua, Huang Rongsheng, and Somphath Sorchampa. 2014. “An Overview of the Hani-Akha People in Laos.” In The Collection of Papers of the Seventh International Conference on Hani/Akha Culture, 121–40. Kunming: Yunnan Publishing Group.

Xishuangbanna Forestry Bureau. 2000. Xi Shuang Ban Na Zhou Tui Geng Huan Lin Gong Cheng Gui Hua[Land conversion project plan of Xishuangbanna Prefecture].Jinghong: Xishuangbanna Forestry Bureau.