China's Backyard

Book excerpt: In this multi-disciplinary and multi-sited volume, the authors challenge reductionist and oversimplifying approaches to understanding China's engagement with Southeast Asia. Productively viewing these interactions through a "e;resource lens"e;, the editor has transcended disciplinary and area studies divides in order to assemble a dynamic and diverse group of scholars with extensive experience across Southeast Asia and in China, all while bringing together perspectives from resource economics, policy analysis, international relations, human geography, political ecology, history, sociology and anthropology. The result is an important collection that not only offers empirically detailed studies of Chinese energy and resource investments in Southeast Asia, but which attends to the complex and often ambivalent ways in which such investments have become both a source of anxiety and aspiration for different stakeholders in the region.