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.