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Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities and displaced persons relying on these lands for their livelihoods and refuge. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/KIA), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the more spectacular politics of the grand infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this region. Moving across plantation sites, armed bases and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and farmers, the paper explores how plantations have transformed not only environmental space but also social-political dynamics of Kachin State in ways, we argue, that are more difficult to reverse than previous or ongoing military territorialization. In doing so, we aim to localize and contextualize the plantation as a key force rapidly transforming Asian borderworlds, over which broader socio-political struggles, environmental transformations, nature loss, connectivity and developmental become imbricated with bordering space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is expected to be a "game-changer" for Pakistan's struggling economy. In China's Yunnan province, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) economic corridor promises to revive old forms of connectivity across the region. While both projects feature prominently in Xi Jinping's signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), neither is particularly new. The BCIM dates back to the Kunming Initiative of 1999, while the CPEC was initiated in the early 2010s. Following the development of both projects over the past decade, this paper shows some of the effects of economic corridors on local trade. It argues that, despite claims of inclusiveness, openness and mutual benefit, such projects often achieve the opposite. In Xinjiang, security concerns have curbed opportunities for Uyghur and Pakistani traders to carry out cross-border trade. In Yunnan, a stricter border regime is favoring well-connected elites over local actors who had been engaged in local trade for decades. I thus argue that the corridor-ization of trade along China's frontiers has brought the end of what I call proximity: the advantages intrinsic to a certain geographical, cultural and historical closeness that used to afford business opportunities to borderland communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]