Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands

Do ethnic minorities have the power to alter the course of their fortune when living within a socialist state? In Frontier Livelihoods, the authors focus their study on the Hmong - known in China as the Miao - in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, contending that individuals and households create livelihoods about which governments often know little.

The product of wide-ranging research over many years, Frontier Livelihoods bridges the traditional divide between studies of China and peninsular Southeast Asia by examining the agency, dynamics, and resilience of livelihoods adopted by Hmong communities in Vietnam and in China’s Yunnan Province. It covers the reactions to state modernization projects among this ethnic group in two separate national jurisdictions and contributes to a growing body of literature on cross-border relationships between ethnic minorities in the borderlands of China and its neighbors and in Southeast Asia more broadly.

Sarah Turner is professor of geography at McGill University. She is the author of Indonesia’s Small Entrepreneurs: Trading on the Margins and editor of Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Christine Bonnin is lecturer in geography at University College Dublin. Jean Michaud is professor of social anthropology at Université Laval. He is the author of The A to Z of the People of the Southeast Asian Massif and coeditor of Moving Mountains: Ethnicity and Livelihoods in Highland China, Vietnam, and Laos.