Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China are Changing a Region ed. by Pál Nyírí and Danielle Tan (review)

Abstract

Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia, edited by Pál Nyíri and Danielle Tan, is an excellent work on the impacts of Chinese immigration and investment in Southeast Asia after the 1990s. Adopting a bottomup perspective with grounding in ethnographic research, the authors, from a broad range of disciplines, successfully portray diverse forms of interactions between different levels of actors using solid data and indepth analyses. While delving into facetoface encounters, the macrocontextual problems are not overlooked. The book begins with Wang Gungwu’s forward, affirming the significance of the authors’ research orientation, then follows with an introduction and then the main content divided into four parts respectively themed: identities, livelihoods, norms, and aspirations. Nyíri and Tan have written a good introduction that contains a rich literature review and succinct discussion of the key points raised in the book. The chapters embrace almost all the countries of Southeast Asia and a wide range of issues, and the editors and authors have carefully made crossreferences with one another to connect and compare respective case studies. This enhances the integrity of the edited volume while illuminating the nuances and disparities between local responses of different countries, as well as within a country in the face of Chinese impacts and asymmetric power relations. In short, this is a highly recommended book that teaches readers about new waves of Chinese immigration, socioeconomic development and borderland livelihoods in Southeast Asia, including those that entail political and environmental contestations. In the following paragraphs I will further discuss the issues treated in the book.