Thinking through the everywhereness of borders: mobile borders, everyday practices, and state logics in Southwest China

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the thesis of the mobile border and the growing interest in cross-border mobilities and practices to understand how borders provide a raison d’être for the organization of everyday life for people living in China’s Southwest borderlands. Through a conversation between the literatures on cross-border mobilities, practices and livelihoods, this study moves beyond the mobile border thesis’s lopsided focus on diffused and dispersed practices that strengthen state sovereignty and border security, but instead emphasizes the kaleidoscopic everyday practices asserting and erasing borders at the same time, the plural rationalities of state governance, and grassroots actors’ agencies and skills in appropriating or transgressing borders. In sum, this study re-appropriates the mobile border thesis to argue that borders are mobile because of their permeation into the textures of everyday life. The empirical study elucidates this argument by investigating two border regions in China, Hekou, and Ruili in Yunnan Province. Specifically, it unpacks four sets of cross-border practices – cross-border socialities and kinship ties, cross-border marriage, labor mobilities, and everyday spaces of exchange – to reveal how what is possible at the everyday level is overdetermined by official territorialities, bottom-up negotiations, and the flexibility of state governance.