China and the Production of Forestlands in Lao PDR: A Political Ecology ofTransnational Enclosure

In Southeast Asia there is a major trend reshaping rural landscapes and the political economy of natural resource development-China's unprecedented pace and scale of economic expansion and demand for resource commodities. China is the world's largest primary-forest-product importer, importing over one hundred million cubic meters of timber products annually since 2003 (Sun, Katsigris, and White 2004). China's increasing demand has resulted in a renewed impetus for illegal logging and forest degradation, and an intensification of struggles over access to resources, both within China and in neighboring countries (Katsigris, Bull, and White 2004). In this chapter I develop a case study of how international timber commodity relations, in combination with ongoing neoliberalinspired reforms, articulate with and produce new practices of enclosure and loss of access to the commons in Laos.