The degree of penetration is sometimes spectacular, as shown by the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, a 101 sq km area given as a concession for 99 years to China's Kings Romans group, where an architecturally exuberant casino capped by a huge fairy-tale crown dominates a newly built Chinatown. Chinese companies are building no fewer than 30 hydroelectric dams in the region, including seven on the Nam Ou river, a tributary of the Mekong. Just outside the old city of Luang Prabang, listed as a World Heritage site by the United Nations, the Yunnan Luang Prabang company is building a five-star resort that will be the largest hotel complex near the former royal capital.
What makes the phenomenon remarkable is that it starts at the bottom of Lao society. Thousands of small farmers and entrepreneurs are leaving southern China, mostly from Guangxi and Yunnan provinces, to set up business in northern Laos.
Chow Liu, a lanky and smiling Chinese farmer, arrived a year ago with his mother in Muang Xay, the main city of Oudomxay province. Offering tea in a kitchen pervaded by flies and poultry, he said he bought the land using a Lao nominee. "I grow everything: long beans, corn, cabbages, chives. I raise pigs, rabbits and ducks and I sell them on the local market," he said. Chow,who does not speak Lao, communicates by gestures with the ethnic minority Akha people he employs on his fields.
About 200 meters from Chow's farm, Zheng Fang-Yin, a Chinese woman, has been renting land from a Lao landowner since 2012, raising fish in large pools that she dug herself. "I made an eight years contract with her. I rent out my land to Chinese simply because they pay much better than Laotians," said Muang Khuan, the landowner. To the south, in Luang Prabang city, Vatsana Chanthavong, another Lao woman, rents a hotel she has built to a Chinese businessman under a 10-year contract. "I am fully satisfied," said Chanthavong. "I ran the hotel myself for two years and I was doing some profit, but I earn more by letting it out. And he has the network to bring the Chinese tourists," she added.