Research design and methodology

Exploring evolving borderlands has led us to examine Yunnan border regions and adjacent parts of Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. This empirical work, conducted over six years, includes detailed observation and documentation of regional infrastructure, processes and places, and interviews with hundreds of local residents, ethnic minorities, business people, government representatives at local, regional, and national levels, military, and cross-border migrants in an effort to establish what Megoran (2017) terms a “border biography.” The information gathered has been assessed and analyzed for several research projects of more focused perspective, but the data collected and the extensive record of exploration in the cross-border region, also yield substantiation of a massive shift in border region geography, and, significantly, theoretical advances in understanding evolving balances achieved in accomplishing cross-border integration and maintaining security.

First, it is necessary to become familiar with border crossings that, since opening in the 1990s, have expanded in number and capacity and changed in relative importance and functional complexity. Table 1 lists ports located on Figures 1 and 4 and identifies ports and nearby areas where the authors have conducted research, interviewed informants, and administered questionnaires. All ports listed were visited during at least one research season, whereas several major crossings have been evaluated over several years. Also during these research periods, authors recorded informal border crossings close to official ports. A combination of structured and semi-structured interviews was conducted during six consecutive field seasons by graduate students supervised by the authors and sanctioned by Yunnan Normal University according to ethical and security guidelines. Local and regional authorities were consulted according to standards established and monitored by the People's Republic of China. Interview questions pertained to why and how people crossed the border, their destinations, origins, routes, purpose, experiences, spatial knowledge, and personal data. Most of this information was utilized for specific studies of cross-border migration, special economic zones, and borderland dynamics (Ptak et al., 2020). Yet, the data reveal insights into types of security spaces and how they emerged, how the system works, and changing roles of border actors. To supplement data acquired from interviews and questionnaires, the authors engaged in extensive field observation within the region. Documentation of crossings also extended to use of border crossing yearbooks compiled for more than a decade for all Chinese ports of entry, as well as observations by other researchers working in the region.

Literature review: Emerging borderlands as reconfigured security spaces

Recently, we examined the emergence of Kokang, a territory occupied by Han Chinese in Myanmar, as a space between exception (separation, unconformity and even deprecation) and integration (linkage, association and even unity) (Hu &Konrad, 2018). In the current article, we engage with spaces of exception (Agamben, 2005), exclusion (exteriority, not quite rejection but certainly seclusion) (Mela & Toldo, 2019), and differentiated integration (Holzinger & Schimmelfennig, 2012) in order to examine spatial dynamics of securing borders and facilitating emerging borderlands of interaction between Yunnan province in China and adjacent Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar (Figure 1).The dynamic, evolving spatial processes of repositioning the border are fundamental to understanding the salient role of borders in globalization. In other global contexts, studies have documented emergence of new or expanded zones of border securitization as trade, migration, and other flows across borders have increased (Deleixhe et al., 2019). The establishment and thickening of the Schengen Zone around the European Union is well documented (Coman, 2019). Within this security space, or associated with it, are found special trade and security enclaves like Ceuta and Melilla adjacent to Morocco (Pallister-Wilkins, 2017) and the Green Zone in Cyprus (Casaglia, 2019). These spaces are either specifically or concurrently corridors, filters, barriers, and detention centers. In Africa, colonial legacy boundaries in the Sahel have enabled insecurity zones in areas remote from central government control and seen engagement of boundary parks and reserves as spaces of simultaneous exception, exclusion, and integration within an ecological framework of security (Ramutsindela, 2017). The Indigenous Reserve of Akwesasne/St. Regis on the US–Canada border, positioned between Quebec, Ontario, and New York, is a space of exception and exclusion, yet it facilitates cross-border interaction under Mohawk Nation scrutiny (Rouviere, 2019). In the United States, zones of border surveillance and regulation now extend one hundred miles beyond the border, and even further to encompass detention centers and US Homeland Security infrastructure. This extended security footprint appears “out of place” in the United States (Boyce, 2018) as it does elsewhere, yet it is emerging as the new normal, and it requires greater scrutiny and detailed assessment as bordering proliferates in globalization (Konrad & Brunet-Jailly, 2019). Most studies previously noted focus on the nature and uniqueness of security spaces but do not necessarily trace their evolution or examine the interplay of spaces of exception, exclusion, and integration as a dynamic and chart the “security-scapes” (Appadurai, 1996) that emerge.

Rapidly evolving borderlands of China and Southeast Asia present an opportunity to accomplish such broader assessment because this is an extensive cross-border region, with multiple and comparable border security contexts, linked to clearly established processes of infrastructure development and security management. Transformed from a frontier to an economic “bridgehead,” Yunnan province materialized as a new state of development in China (Su, 2013).Yunnan thrusts significantly into Southeast Asia in order to provide effective access for China into bordering countries, their immediate neighbors Thailand and Cambodia, and India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Figure 1). In essence, the province is identified as China's gateway to southern Asia (Su, 2016). Ultimately, Yunnan has been repositioned in China and in Southeast Asia. The province's extensive border with Southeast Asia is viewed now as an asset and a zone of linkage and transition to the south.

In Yunnan, interplay of increased cross-border interactions, at various scales and in specific locales, has set the stage for emerging borderlands (Sturgeon, 2013b). Cross-border cooperation has become intertwined with region-making (Chen, 2018). This rescaled and multiscalar regionalization has been explored to explain regional and urban development dynamics (Chen, 2018), but the research also calls for alignment with border studies theory and approaches and more attention to rearticulation of security space. Only recently, have researchers in this region addressed border interaction with China (Lagerqvist, 2013). International land boundaries are not in dispute here, but territorial entitlement and sense of ownership across the border prevail, particularly among Chinese occupants of borderlands who recognize historical evidence of Chinese construction in Lao Cai, Vietnam, for example, or claim kinship with Han residents of Kokang, now in adjacent Myanmar (Hu & Konrad, 2018). The border has never been closed completely, and it is difficult for governments on both sides to close the border to formal and informal exchanges. These spaces are remote border areas far from administrative and supply centers, particularly in Laos and Myanmar. Here, border area residents will buy and sell across the border to sustain themselves. China has recognized the growth potential of cross-boundary exchange, and offsets from this trade may help increase the standard of living for residents in Yunnan borderlands. In some circumstances, cross-border trade promotes economic development in border regions. Although national security remains less of an imperative in these borderlands than, for example, China's borders with some of its western and northern neighbors, an endemic drug problem has resulted in a regime of strict border security to interdict drugs at the same time that other flows—rubber, sugar cane, livestock—are enabled and promoted (Baird & Vue, 2017; Su, 2015; Turner et al., 2015). Overall, the Chinese government's aims at national, provincial, and local levels are to coordinate trade and development, enhance security,and lessen regulation. The sanctioned movement of goods and people across borders now epitomizes a new order in border relations on China's perimeter (Summers, 2013). The goal in this article is to link insights about border security space with economic, urban, and cultural dynamics in these borderlands within a framework to help explain how these spaces of exception, exclusion, and integration emerge.

Conceptual approach

A new and expanded role for the border zone, with the Greater Mekong Region as its apex (Chen, 2018), requires a multilayered and flexible approach to border security to at once maintain integrity of the border and Chinese territory and enable and adjust to rapidly evolving and increasing cross-border flows. Accordingly, security is approached as a multifaceted project ranging from zero tolerance on drugs at the border to acceptance of unregulated exchange of common consumer items and displaying different security goals and strategies at local, regional, and national scales. Spaces of exception, exclusion, and integration emerge within borderlands according to a spatial order based on mediation of governance, flows, cultural tradition, and security imperatives. The approach in China has been flexible and dependent on the circumstances of 14 bilateral border relationships. Border security space for China usually encompasses a border security zone of variable extent and intensity within China and a negotiated presence in neighboring countries, such as surveillance zones in Nepal (Murton, 2019) or special trade exclaves in Laos (Nyiri, 2012). Formerly marginalized, these border spaces have increasingly acquired more central geo-economic and geopolitical importance, and the security spaces have the most profound impact at a regional scale (Su, 2016, p. 184). When there is conflict, as demonstrated recently in Kokang along the Myanmar border, the border security zone is locked down and cross-border movements are restricted (Hu & Konrad, 2018). In the rapidly evolving borderlands of China and Southeast Asia, multiscalar expression of security challenges appears to engage with economic, political, social and cultural concerns in a relational motion of policy adjustments and innovations (Ptak et al., 2020).

We offer a conceptualization of how this works to reinterpret and redeploy boundaries in borderlands by Chinese authorities as well as borderlands residents. First, China's central government in coordination with Yunnan province prioritized strategic “high-level” ports by linking them to Kunming with expressways, defining their priority with institutional arrangements, and supporting their growth with large construction projects (Figures 1, 2, 4, 6). In order to promote economic development and cooperation, China and its neighbors established border economic cooperation zones at high-level ports (Chen, 2018). These zones are now located at three primary crossing points—Ruili, Mohan, and Hekou—and nearing completion at Houqiao crossing on the proposed arterial across Mynamar to India. Also, to promote circulation of people and goods in these formally “bounded” areas, and adjacent borderlands, all neighboring countries, and particularly China, adjusted the boundary effect by strengthening the mediation effect of the international boundary and by weakening the shielding effect of this border. But, by weakening the shielding effect, security became compromised. This compromise of the territorial order is a fundamental shift in the borderlands spatial reconfiguration. A line becomes a space, and this space assumes content differentiated from space beyond the now formalized borderlands, because it is contained by another line. China, and to a lesser degree its immediate southern neighbors, established alternative security borders at a distance inside the borderlands (Figure 2). For China, these security borders sometimes number two or more lines of security checkpoints within 50 km of the international border. A core zone of the borderlands at the international boundary is easily and regularly traversed by local residents, and the international boundary has become more symbolic for them. The real control for borderland residents, from both sides of the international boundary, occurs at alternative boundaries where security checkpoints may be crossed only by persons authorized to enter or leave borderlands China (Figures 2, 3). The significance of this spatial reconfiguration of security space is evident at once in the simplicity of the spatial alteration and in the considerable impact that spatial change wields in regional development, mobility, interaction, stability, and, ultimately, security.

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Conceptualization of Borderlands Security Strategy. This diagram by the authors illustrates how border security is evolving into a spatially extensive borderlands security system of regulated crossings, check points, corridors, and border places.

Citation: Regions and Cohesion 11, 2; 10.3167/reco.2021.110202

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Security Checkpoint on Expressway between Mangshi and Baoshan, China. This photo by Zhiding Hu emphasizes the implementation of strict controls at a distance from the border on major arterial transportation routes. The photo was taken on June 11, 2017.

Citation: Regions and Cohesion 11, 2; 10.3167/reco.2021.110202

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Expansive Borderlands. This map, compiled by the authors, illustrates the features of the evolved border crossing system of checkpoints, special economic zones, corridors, and borderlands places in the cross-border region.

Citation: Regions and Cohesion 11, 2; 10.3167/reco.2021.110202

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The changing role of security in borderland places and spaces: From common edges to scaled and differentiated crossings

Clearly evident from the research is an emerging hierarchy of border crossings and corridors that rapidly form a framework and template for further borderlands articulation and development. Within this framework, the border, border places, and border spaces all become rescaled. Although this process of evolving borderlands is extensive and engages most places and spaces in the vast border region stretching more than 2000 km, three arterial corridors emanating from Kunming play the major role in connecting, integrating and shaping the China–Southeast Asia borderlands. These three corridors each connect Kunming, center of the emerging borderlands, to Vietnam, Laos (and Thailand and Cambodia), and Myanmar. Figures 1 and 4 illustrate centrality of Kunming in this emerging system of places, establishment and enhancement of major border crossings with border economic and security zones, and elevated strategic importance of intermediate points along these corridors to Southeast Asia.

Hekou-Lao Cai

A significant changing role of place is transformation of edge places into crossing places in a hierarchy of enhanced border crossings (Fox, 2009). Some edge places, the vanguard border cities, have changed most dramatically in size, number and alteration of functions, crossing enhancements, and overall settlement viability (Teng et al., 2017). One vanguard border city, Hekou, located approximately 400 km southeast of Kunming, is recently accessible from the metropolitan hub by a four-lane highway. About 20 km from the border, there is a military checkpoint, and there is another security check at the formal perimeter around the bustling border city of Hekou with its separate auto and people crossings to Lao Cai, Vietnam, and Hanoi beyond. Hekou epitomizes at once a space of exclusion and exception and a place of enhanced integration. As illustrated in the following discussion, security space is expanded, extended to specific points and zones within the borderlands by national authorities engaging with local actors, and differentiated to shape a multiscalar security complex focused on Hekou.

Hekou occupies a security zone where all persons and goods are checked before they enter or leave the perimeter. Inspection is managed by Chinese military to control and restrict crossing to the “urban island” of Hekou within a vast, underpopulated tropical jungle. Wenshan (Tianbo) crossing lies a challenging five-hour drive east, and Jinshuihe crossing is situated an equally difficult two-hour drive west along narrow mountain roads. Outside Jinshuihe, a Chinese military facility commands access to the border zone. Approximately 60 km north, a “border inspection” facility at Jinping commands a cross-road town in Hani ethnic territory. This inspection facility allows strategic control of traffic within the expanding border zone, although it cannot control access across the border by local trails. Consequently, as reported by local inhabitants, informal crossing still occurs, but this type of crossing is becoming less common and is now restricted to very remote stretches along the border. The border region extends to Mengzi where borderlands functions related to transportation, utilities, and security management are concentrated.

Access to and from Hekou requires electronic checks of identity documents. This insures that local Vietnamese may not travel farther into China than Hekou, whereas authorized travelers including business and transport personnel have documentation to pass. Trucks and cars crossing between Vietnam and China must now use the recently constructed highway bridge where inspection is rapid and thorough, with scanners, computers, and traffic control. Adjacent to the crossing is the Beishan Development Area, which provides border functions such as brokerage and truck repair. Scaled down from this facility and crossing process is the traditional formal crossing between the centers of Hekou and Lao Cai across the Red River. This local crossing is now restricted to pedestrian traffic although substantial trade still occurs here. Before the highway bridge was completed, a massive rush of thousands of Vietnamese crossed daily in an assortment of vehicles and on foot. Today, the crossing ritual still begins precisely at eight o'clock in the morning, but film records confirm it is more subdued and managed than before. Lines for people with and without goods form in Lao Cai before the barrier is lifted. The quickest Vietnamese across the border are assured rapid access to begin the day of domestic work, vending, or other sanctioned activity in Hekou. After immigration and customs clearance, waiting taxis and motorbikes take Vietnamese to work. Vendors move carts and bicycles to their spots around the city. Most entrants carry local identity documents that are not machine readable and, consequently, may not be used to leave Hekou security zone (Figure 5). One of the domestic workers interviewed showed us her “passport,” which contained multiple pages of entry and exit stamps, each recording a day spent working in Hekou. Daily registration takes place in a newly renovated and air-conditioned facility that also boasts a large duty-free shop that caters mainly to returning Chinese. Hekou is now a place increasingly connected with other places in China and in Vietnam as homeowners rent their houses to Vietnamese and Chinese businessmen while they live elsewhere in the community or work in eastern China.

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Identity Document for Vietnamese Worker in Hekou. This picture reveals the daily record of border crossing required by Vietnamese workers in Hekou. The document is good for entry and work in Hekou, but it may not be used for travel into China beyond the border city. Photo by Zhiding Hu, June 10, 2016.

Citation: Regions and Cohesion 11, 2; 10.3167/reco.2021.110202

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Across the border, Lao Cai serves as a bedroom community for the workforce that migrates daily to Hekou. Lao Cai features a growing number of the gambling facilities and clubs now outlawed in adjacent China. Also evident are services catering to cross-border traffic of local and long-distance nature, including auto repair, brokerage, accommodation, and restaurants. The highway from Lao Cai to Hanoi has seen significant upgrades, particularly since the completion of the expressway from Kunming to Hekou. It is now possible to travel between Hanoi and Kunming in one day. Unlike in Hekou, security in Lao Cai remains largely focused at the border.

Ruili-Muse and the western borderlands

Ruili is the center of borderlands that stretch from Tengchong near the foothills of the Himalaya south to Kokang. In these fertile valleys, Han and ethnic Dai and Jingpo occupy the expansive borderlands. There are numerous border crossings but only a few national crossings (Figure 4). Since 2015, Chinese territory adjacent to Kokang remains a restricted security zone where the Chinese military controls all movement into and out of the 20–30 km wide border zone (Hu & Konrad, 2018). In contrast, the national crossing at historic Wanding, utilized by the allies in World War II against Japanese invasion of Burma, is open to tourists from China and abroad. Wanding Border Port Culture Park celebrates the interface of China and Myanmar and the ethnic minorities who occupy this region. The region is an extensive agricultural and industrial area long occupied by Han Chinese at the mountainous frontier of Chinese expansion and trade. Security space embraces restricted zones under military control in Kokang and north along the Kachin frontier, special security, trade zones, and expedited crossings at Wanding, Jiegao, and Houqiao, interior checkpoints along major thoroughfares into the border region, and relatively casual surveillance at local crossings throughout the borderlands.

One highway and infrastructure corridor, completed in 2017, leads to Dehong. The high-speed railway, and other aspects of infrastructure are under construction. Adjacent to the north is rural Longchuan County where Han farmers and entrepreneurs from other parts of China engage in small business including cross-border trade. Tengchong County, junction of Han civilization and the Lisu mountain tribe frontier, was a southwestern hub of the Silk Road established in 206 BCE. Recently, the small yet rapidly expanding city gained an airport at Tuofeng in 2009 and was connected to Baoshan by expressway in 2016. Security checkpoints are both fixed and mobile in these borderlands, illustrating the rapidly changing nature of security requirements as infrastructure evolves constantly, cross-border trading patterns shift, and border relations change with autonomous minorities across the boundary in Myanmar.

The northwestern route into the China–Myanmar border region, Houqiao Port, near Tengchong, was opened to Myanmar in 2003. In 2017, despite limited cross-border traffic, an international market and duty-free facility were completed, reflecting China's “build it and they will come” policy of border crossing development. Also found along the border are small, local crossings and, beyond these, informal crossings where people feel confident in merely jumping the border at will. This is tolerated by both Chinese and Myanmar officials because interior checkpoints seal immediate borderlands. About 50 km into China from the “Tengchong border” lies the additional frontier checkpoint at Feng Ping. Like other interior checkpoints, this military post serves to secure movement in the borderlands. Although cross-border trade in this area is dominated by importation and manufacture of hardwood from Myanmar, shipments are monitored to ensure that illegal substances and manufactures are not allowed. Isolated in the far west is Pianma port where most cross-border traffic is local and no interior checkpoint is evident, or, apparently warranted, although there is evidence of disassembled, mobile checkpoints. From Pianma north to the junction of Myanmar, Tibet, and Yunnan, mountain ranges dominate, border crossing is localized, and security is casual.

The southern expressway prong crosses into Myanmar near Ruili, the major entry point into Myanmar from China. Ruili is a modern sprawling and affluent city with wide boulevards and substantial suburban expansion fueled by growing trade with Myanmar. The focal point is the special trade zone of Jiegao (Figure 6). Here is an entry and exit checkpoint before one actually arrives at the pedestrian and auto crossings to Myanmar at Ruili/Muse. The special trade zone is dominated by Chinese merchants engaged in jade trade whereas other cross-border trade, particularly hardwood, is found both in the zone and beyond it in the burgeoning city. In the trade zone, the jade section hugs the border and conducts a brisk and competitive trade, mainly to Chinese from other parts of the country. Also here, low order goods, like cigarettes, candy, and other consumer goods, and high order goods, like drugs, are sold “through the fence.” According to informants, the murky border “where Burma dissolves into China” is found in the trade zone and in more remote rural areas away from Ruili.

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Jiego Trade Zone Entrance, Ruili, China. This photo shows the imposing gateway into the special trade zone in Ruili. Burmese allowed to work in Riuli's trade zone may not venture outside the zone. Chinese traffic into the trade zone is regulated at this gate as well. Photo by Zhiding Hu, September 12, 2015

Citation: Regions and Cohesion 11, 2; 10.3167/reco.2021.110202

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Scaling local to global flows and security: Emerging geopolitics

Borderlands of China and Southeast Asia exhibit defined scalar thresholds—local, regional, provincial, national, and global—and multiscalar production within emerging borderlands (Ptak & Hommel, 2016). Whereas the anchor of locality holds strong and is sustained by ethnic minority culture and status, local borderland economies and isolation, borderland localities are defining themselves as ethnic minority regions along the border. Here are found local flows of goods, peoples, and information now sanctioned and supported by an open-border policy. Beyond this strong local and micro-regional identity and system of flows, the threshold to provincial connections and authorities, and cross-border interactions, remains more ambiguous (Freeman & Thompson, 2011). Yunnan provincial authority is actually more present than it appears in the borderlands by virtue of growing metropolitan dominance of Kunming in southern China. Although Kunming is a long way from the border, this rapidly growing hub influences the emerging character and connectivity of borderlands (Ptak et al., 2020). In the case of Mynamar, the greater autonomy of Burmese borderland “states” contributed to borderlands interaction well before the border was opened. Yet, recent extension of federal authority to peripheral regions suggests that a new order of borderlands interaction may be emerging, with an emphasis on greater engagement of central government in borderlands security management. Thresholds to national and global scales within the borderlands are more evident and well signed. National crossings are readily identified by national symbolic images and huge flat screens offering videos of Chinese state messages regarding territorial sovereignty, cultural awareness, infrastructure advances, and economic goals. These symbols, although more subdued and less technologically advanced, are found at provincial and local crossings as well. English signage is the cue to global thresholds. The sudden appearance of English signage at or near the vanguard crossings is usually associated with an international trade space or directions and information for non-Chinese. National and global flows of people, goods, and services are still comparatively new to the borderlands. These flows, and the security measures designed to control them, are highly concentrated in three arterial corridors and places and spaces associated with these corridors. Chinese armed forces are characteristically situated in bases nearby, and their presence and participation in security work is evident at strategic checkpoints in both populated and underpopulated spaces in borderlands.

Within borderlands, security works increasingly with a “beyond the border” strategy which is overt and often subtler. Kunming is an accessible international metropolis, but as hub and flow-through center of the borderlands transportation and communication system, it is a securitized space. This is increasingly the case for the international airport and the central train station that experienced a terrorist attack several years ago. Security checkpoints also are found at strategic locations in the borderlands secondary road network. The security forces recognize the need for efficient control of growing, extensive, and accessible borderland territory by policing not only the border but also extended borderlands space. The interior line of checkpoints defines an edge of borderlands that is misleading because functional borderlands extend beyond this security perimeter to intermediary cities and the borderlands hub. Also, informal exchange and crossings among border locality residents are tolerated and scrutinized minimally. Observations at or near smaller, local crossings laying in Long Choan County, and Jinshuihe on the Vietnam border, suggest that border security has a light touch with regard to informal crossing by local populations and their exchange of low order goods. Formal business and travel across the border is treated, however, with formal identity verification and required levies for goods. In this international exchange arena, security now demands machine readable documentation for both people and goods.

Conclusions

For three decades, China has accelerated trade and interaction across its boundaries. Initiatives like “Belt and Road” continue to emphasize that, while China moves to develop more extensive relationships with its neighbors and global partners, cross-border linkages aim to sustain territorial and border integrity. China's territorial vision has moved beyond the historical metaphor of the “wall” to define edges and limits yet articulate borderlands creation that combines cross-border engagement with territorial integrity. In these new borderlands, extensive infrastructure enhancement, economic development, cultural viability, and security positioning all play roles in rescaling and rearticulating border space, shaping coexistent spaces of exception and exclusion, and integration.

China's borderlands with Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, have been, until recently, remote and underdeveloped in multiscalar cross-border connections and flows. Change has been rapid and resulted in emergence of specific border constructs and visible and measurable evolution of a borderlands regime. Forces and constructs evident, and their interrelationship and sequencing, illustrate an evolving “security-scape.” In a China–Southeast Asian context, top-down influences and articulation by central governments, and particularly by Beijing, are catalysts for borderlands security. Yet, whereas central governments often align and form the border security regime and establish controls, local and provincial governments and powerful local agents lead the move toward crossing the border. Also, bottom-up initiative, resistance, and compliance, mainly by ethnic minorities, shape the evolving border crossing and security space. There are, then, multiple Chinas, rather than a central Chinese monolith at work in fashioning the borderlands. Aligned with this evolution of borderlands, and the immense changes accompanying it, is an approach to border security that is decidedly “beyond the border” in character and intent.

This article has examined the security spatialization process with a focus on vanguard crossings at Hekou, Mohan, and Ruili. A major conclusion that challenges the prevailing notion that borderlands are largely a transition or interaction zone between two nation-states is that borderlands evolve with discernable structure, spatial complexity, and place differentiation. When borderlands emerge, space and place are challenged and a new order of relationships evolves. As suggested in this study, some places are invested with new status, power, complexity, and viability, whereas others may become less important in a new “borderlands hierarchy.” Spaces such as corridors and special trade zones bolster this new order. Vanguard crossings lead the crossing regime and cap the hierarchy of crossing places. An interior “border place” predominates as a hub in the emerging borderlands system of places. And, in-between the hub and border, are discernable edges of successive security spaces and functional borderlands.

Another conclusion supports the growing understanding that borders and borderlands are always in relational motion. This is certainly apparent in the emergence pattern outlined in this article. Places and spaces change within expanding borderlands and in relation to the changing nature and positioning of the border. Actually, multiple and differentiated borders emerge at the state boundary where locals and ethnic minorities have different borders than other Chinese or foreigners. In the borderlands, there are other borders at checkpoints. A primary border has emerged at Kunming's international access points. Furthermore, this motion and change appears to be continual with no finished border or borderlands in sight as borders and security are repositioned and rescaled. Even the goal of efficient, integrated borderlands remains elusive, because it is impacted constantly by changing relationships with neighboring nation-states or provinces, and increasingly by global impacts that find their way even to remote borderlands of China and Southeast Asia.