The New Hinterlands of Global China: Digital Connection, Suspension, and Precarity in Southeast Asia

Event Date: 17th November 2025

This presentation explores how people build a sense of place and community in the development zones and corridors that have become focal sites of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia.

It develops a concept of ‘new hinterlands’ to describe and analyse infrastructure spaces like Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC). Here, infrastructural reconfigurations of space produce a new kind of hinterland, one where life is often suspended somewhere between the rural and urban, between the agricultural and industrial, and between the past and the future.

In the new hinterlands, livelihoods subsist and ‘make do’ with the uncertain and temporary opportunities eked out at the margins of global supply chains. The EEC’s geography of ambition is a landscape caught in a limbo between connectivity and abandonment, development and dispossession.

Broadly, this presentation asks: within these spaces meant to facilitate movement, how do connective infrastructures produce interstitial and contingent landscapes of settling? How do people ‘make do’ and forge places of belonging, identity, and care in a space that has been designed to literally pass them by?

About the speaker:
Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2012 to 2023 he was Director of the Colorado Center for Asian Studies, and from 2018 to 2023 he was Project Director of China Made, an international research collective focusing on China’s infrastructure-driven model of export development, funded by The Henry Luce Foundation.

He has published extensively on the cultural and political effects of rural and urban development in China, cultural governance, tourism and heritage development, and most recently, infrastructural urbanism. Recent visiting faculty positions have included the National University of Singapore, University of Oslo, University of Hong Kong, Wageningen University, and Guizhou Minzu University. His current book project, forthcoming 2026, is Living in Nuclear Asia: Sociotechnical Perspectives on Nuclear Power Development, Risk, and Vulnerability (University of Toronto).

Chair:
The event will be chaired by Professor Rachel Harris (Professor of Ethnomusicology, SOAS Department of Music).