Politics of Gateway: Negotiating Co-existences and Governance across Borders II

Conference Panel Convenor:
Borders can be both rigid and fluid, constraining and facilitating, and promoting and discouraging connectivity. Borders exist to create social, political and economic divisions; yet, under certain circumstances, they also minimize differences and enhance material flows, human contacts, and technology and idea exchanges. Many border zones, in historical times, were not marginal regions, but prosperous strips of international trade corridors facilitating material flows and cultural diffusion. Border and borderland studies often inquire into the different political conditions and cultural climates under which border zones thrive as gateways for co-prosperity or impedes co-existence and development.
This panel brings together a total of six papers, looking at a variety of borderlands (including those in-between Hong Kong and China, Vietnam and China, Malaysia and Singapore, and Russia and China) and development corridors (such as China-South Asia, China-Central Asia, and Taiwan-Southeast Asia). The papers will be located in two sub-panels with different emphases.
This second sub-panel examines the actual co-existence and ground-level interactions of people. The BRI connects China to Central Asia and Caucasus and brings the Chinese afar. Susanne Fehlings discusses how border trade encourages a large number of Chinese to settle in Georgia and examines their encounters and strategies of co-existence with the local people. Naomi Chi looks at the plights of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East who reached the border zones of Korea and Japan. Co-existence is out of the question as people in both countries hold a general animosity towards intruding refugees. Ironically, the acts of excluding refugees with the intention of protecting one’s identity and national borders have actually challenged the sense of Korean-ness and Japanese-ness and forced the people to reflect on their own status quo in the world. The third paper by Eva Hung and Olga Adams, on the other hand, looks at how shuttle traders (and carriers) negotiate and contest their border-crossing at the checkpoint in the Chinese-Russian borderland. Shuttle trade, though informal, is highly organized in accordance with the checkpoint setting. The border arrangement and hence the checkpoint setup thus allow the co-existence of both the formal and informal passage of border-crossers.