Ambivalent Encounters: Business and the Sex Markets at the China-Vietnam Borderland

Abstract

THE NIGHT IS FALLING UPON THE RED RIVER. GLITTERING LIGHTS, blaring music, and noise from dozens of new shops along the riverbanks in Hekou, a small border city located where China joins Vietnam, give the night a boisterous atmosphere. But according to locals, these new buildings were not a welcome sight for their Vietnamese neighbors living across the river in Lao Cai. Their views of the river were blocked, they said, and the noise at night was too loud and disruptive; these structures were construed as an ominous sign of the strong Chinese presence at the border. Indeed, since the late 1990s, the opening of Chinese border ports as Special Economic Zones attracted hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial Chinese to migrate to the margins of China and venture into cross-border trade. At different locations along the China-Vietnam borderlands, fastpaced development projects mushroomed to stimulate bilateral economic exchange.