Air pollution created by agricultural burning has become a critical environmental problem across Southeast Asia, but the solution to it remains unclear. In this essay I discuss the haze crisis in a small community in Northern Thailand, and show how an increase in contract farming is accompanied by a decrease in agricultural spirit rituals. I argue that this change represents a broader shift in the cosmopolitical ecology of the region, as large agricultural businesses hide behind continuing narratives about ‘slash-and-burn’ ‘hill tribes’ to advance an environmentally unsustainable agenda.

This article, grounded in archival research from Chinese border prefectures, delves into the complexities of migration dynamics, specifically the phenomena of exodus from and return to China following the Communist takeover in 1949. It reveals how various reforms, enforced collectivisation and religious restrictions disrupted local lives, causing social panic and identity crises, which led to the disintegration of everyday life among borderland communities. Local residents’ responses predominantly involved crossing the border to seek refuge in Burma. The article critically scrutinises local authorities’ efforts to alleviate resultant instability, with the aim of retaining the borderland populace and attracting back those who had left, while also imposing the ideologies of the new communist state. Rather than viewing these ‘illicit’ cross-border movements as mere acts of resistance to governance, this study argues that they involved active negotiations for a stable daily life amid socio-political upheaval. The research contributes new insights into the micro-level mechanisms of state-building, and the integration of borderland peoples into the new Communist regime. Amid mass emigration and repatriation, state engagement permeated daily life in borderland communities, facilitating national identity formation and nation-state construction.

This article explores the large-scale deployment of Chinese soldiers during the Vietnam War as part of China's aid to Laos, especially its logistical and military support for the Pathet Lao, in the geopolitical context of competition with America in mainland Southeast Asia. This article spotlights the history of China's clandestine campaign in Laos in the late 1960s to 1970s, based on recent articles, books, unpublished or informally published memoirs by and interviews with ex-servicemen, mainly lower-ranking officers, soldiers and army engineers who found themselves in an unknown Southeast Asian country. While the Chinese troops were spurred on by their sense of patriotism and socialist internationalism, they also desired peace so that they could return home. Many of the then young soldiers struggled to adjust to a campaign fought in the unfamiliar environment of northern Laos, and were traumatised by the sight of fallen comrades. It is these very same Chinese soldiers who fought in Laos who have become the main advocates of the declassification of China's secret war through their publications and social media postings, although their accounts are not officially endorsed or published for the mass market and this knowledge remains largely within their circles.

This article seeks to trace the evolution of North Vietnam's strategy in Laos from 1945 to 1975. I have three points to argue. First, the Vietnamese dealt with Laos on the basis of the Indochinese idea, not only during the immediate anticolonial period as scholars have argued, but also in the decades of struggle against the United States. Second, while the Indochinese idea treated North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as an interconnected entity, different priorities were attached to each component; revolutionary efforts differed from country to country. Third, the Vietnamese communists were flexible in translating this idea to adapt to the changing realities over three decades, from armed to political struggles, or a combination of both at different times.

When the French occupied Cochinchina in 1862 they encountered many issues related to language and communication that hindered their ability to effectively govern the local population. This article will discuss how the French attempted to establish a College of Interpreters to institutionalise interpreters and to enforce a translation regime where quốc ngữ served as the intermediary script between Chinese and French to overcome translation challenges. Their translation surveillance system, via legal protocols, ultimately failed to discipline local interpreters and regulate translation, nor did it protect French colonial interests and agenda in Vietnam, due to pedagogical, financial and administrative constraints.

Scholars studying international retirement migration (IRM) refer to lifestyle migration to explain the motives and aspirations of older individuals who choose to relocate out of their home country. Here I investigate French retirees’ reasons for migrating to Southeast Asia, and their sense of purpose in doing so. Interviews with 17 retirees living in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and Vientiane, Laos, whose narratives evoked some degree of historical relevance, suggest that certain migration choices are best understood in the context of a postcolonial moment comprising colonialism and its dissolution, the Cold War, and the postcolonial diaspora. Such an approach illuminates the relationship between history, migration, and pensioners’ respective biographies in explaining their retirement journeys to former colonies, and in how these experiences foster multifaceted hybrid identities embedded in various historical moments.

This article investigates P. Ramlee's little-known attempt at transnationalising Malay cinema in the early 1960s. Using biographical records, newspaper reports and film magazines, I trace the star's earliest direct contact with Hong Kong cinema, his plans to make Malay films in Hong Kong, the controversy that ensued, and the outcomes of these grand plans. Situating this episode in its historical context, this article unsettles standard narratives of P. Ramlee, and Malay and Malaysian film histories. It demonstrates that, as opposed to the seemingly inevitable ethnonational route, and in contrast to the hypernationalist characterisation of P. Ramlee today, a transnational model was once envisioned through P. Ramlee as a potential future for Malay cinema in the face of tumultuous geopolitical changes. It also brings to light the complex role that labour activism played in shaping post-studio era development of Malay cinema, and the roots of Malaysian national cinema.