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China's Opium Replacement Policy (ORP) is one of the country's earliest cross-border development interventions in the upper Mekong region. A massive state subsidy program for "alternative" development in the northern parts of Myanmar and Laos, the ORP helped finance a wave of Chinese agribusiness investments abroad since the mid-2000s, causing significant social and ecological transformation. Yet key details about the program remain opaque. In this article, we contribute to a growing literature on the rising economic power of China's "peripheral centers," borderland prefectures whose role in foreign affairs has increased significantly as the country's borders become more porous. We review state motives for establishing the ORP and use public records about the program's activities in Myanmar and Laos to interrogate the vertical politics that structure and complicate the ORP's implementation. The program's public records are characterized by a mix of transparency and opacity which we analyse to show that the ORP's increasing transparency since around 2010 has moved away from regulating impacts abroad and instead toward securing and distributing benefits for borderland business (and their interlinked political) interests in China. As borderland authorities play a growing role in China's foreign trade, we show that the vertical politics that increasingly shape the regulatory environment have allowed the ORP to proliferate in size and influence as state oversight of its activities abroad has waned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream portrayals of Chinese overseas land investments tend to treat Chinese capital as monolithic, synonymous with the Chinese state, and extracting resources from other countries unhindered. These portrayals flatten host country landscapes where investment occurs, obscure the embeddedness and diversity of Chinese investors, and ignore the spatially contingent channels through which Chinese capital, actors, and goods flow. In response, this article suggests that methodological shifts in the land grabs literature could address recent calls for grounding studies of global China. It compares the cases of Chinese banana and rubber investments in Laos to demonstrate that sub-national state actors, histories and material realities of land politics, and the diversity of investors across sectors and regions must be considered. The contrast between how the two types of Chinese agricultural investments have been established and governed is best understood through comparative, grounded research attentive to multiple perspectives and scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite centuries of state-directed eradication efforts, opium cultivation persists in northern Laos and Myanmar. The most recent of these efforts is China’s Opium Replacement Program (ORP). Like other illicit crop substitution programmes, the ORP seeks to provide opium cultivators with licit livelihood alternatives. Unlike other programmes, it does so by supporting Chinese agribusiness investors in the 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]