Integrating with Southeast Asia is a key component of
China’s multi-pronged regionalisation around its borders as
its global rise continues. Below, Xiangming Chen and Curtis
Stone consider the ambition of China’s ‘Go Southwest’
strategy to extend its economic interests and influence into
Southeast Asia, and explore how China’s regional assertion
reinforces the larger trend of new spatial configurations in
light of increasing globalisation. The authors show how
simultaneous globalisation and regionalisation unleashes
a dual process of de-bordering and re-bordering where the
traditional barrier role of borders is yielding more to that
of bridges, as small, marginal, and remote border cities and
towns become larger centers of trade and tourism. This
article examines China’s effort to engage Southeast Asia
and many of China’s footprints within and beyond the cities
of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Inter-country and
intra-regional trade provides the starting point for examining
the extent of economic integration in the GMS, and also
its unbalanced development.