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This paper engages with the concept of territorialization through telling the story of the transformation of Chinese former Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers of Yunnanese origin and their descendants living in northern Thailand, from being opium and heroin traders and smugglers, to becoming mercenaries fighting against the Communist Party of Thailand in northern Thailand on behalf of the Thai military, to finally transforming into tea farmers and traders through receiving development aid support provided from the Republic of China (Taiwan). Taiwan's development aid was ostensibly only for humanitarian purposes, but in reality also had important underlying political objectives. We argue territorialization is a more-than-human political technology. In particular, it is argued that territorialization frequently combines both military politics and development politics, even though the literature often separates these two elements, as if they are not frequently intertwined and interrelated. Here, we show how these two forms of politics, one explicit and one much less so, can come together to create new social and economic realities, ones with important geographical and geopolitical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The simultaneous but incompatible desires for both “tradition” and “advancement” have produced the “ambiguity of modernity” in the areas of minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu diqu) on China’s southwest frontier. This paper, in accordance, directly addresses the ambiguity of modernity through the investigation of the tea landscape in Yunnan. This essay builds on Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier’s “global assemblage” framework to analyze the relationship between the “global form” of modernity and the situated assemblages of “ambiguity of modernity” in southwest China. Data are based on ethnographic research in the village of Mangjing, located in Jingmai Mountain, a renowned tea mountain in Yunnan. Most of the villagers in Mangjing are one of the minority nationalities of China, Bulang. I discuss the state-led project in transforming the modern tea plantation for “restoring” a landscape deemed as “ancient tea forest” (guchalin) in Mangjing. In addition, I address Bulang villagers’ and government officials’ multiple responses to the transformation of tea landscapes. I argue that the transformation of tea landscapes has been the practice to turn the “global form” of modernity into the shifting “assemblages” amongst tradition, modernity, science, and nature. The ambiguity of modernity has emerged from the shifting assemblages, providing both the state and Bulang villagers more leeway to symbolically and physically (re)produce meanings for the tea landscapes to meet the contingent market demand for tea. The transformation of tea landscapes, however, has become another process to perpetuate Bulang villagers’ social status of being “low quality” as China’s minority nationalities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]