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Prologue May 2008 In May 2008, two horrific events called international attention to the corner of the world that is the focus of this book. On May 2, Cyclone Nargis ripped through Burma, causing the immediate death of some 100,000 to 150,000 people and displacement and suffering for as many as 1.5 million more. On May 12, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake centered near the city of Chengdu leveled enormous areas of Sichuan province in western China, just north of Yunnan province and mainland Southeast Asia, causing the immediate deaths of some 70,000 to 90,000 people and displacement and suffering for as many as 11 million more. These events occasioned considerable commentary in the international media on issues ranging from the generalities of disaster preparedness to the culpability of the Burmese government in blocking Western aid and of the Chinese government in constructing schools with shoddy building materials. However salient the issues of life and death in this context—and without question the salience was great—such disaster-based attentiveness has the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing a popularly mediated tendency to know only what is sensational enough to merit “news” coverage. The topic of this book, regional integration in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), itself a part of broader development processes in East and Southeast Asia, is certainly far less “newsworthy” on a daily basis. Yet, for better or worse (and fortunately in this case it is often for better), more lives and deaths will be affected in any given year by the kinds of processes discussed here than will be affected by the horrors of a given hurricane or earthquake. It is certainly not my brief to prod major corporate media and insist they pay more attention to mundane but crucial factors conditioning life and death; their agenda is set by various forces over which I have no influence. In any event, there is actually ample, and often excellent, “alternative” media coverage of issues in the GMS by organizations like Inter Press Services. I do hope that the readers of this book will be able, as a result of the issues I raise here, to see the region of the world that hit the headlines in May 2008 as more than a place of occasional disaster and sporadic , opportunistic interest shown by the rest of the world. GMS development will never likely be “newsworthy” outside of East and Southeast Asia, but it will be 2 PRoloGUE vitally important to those who live within the GMS and worthy of understanding by those who are interested in moving beyond the front pages of the papers and the images on news Web sites. Beyond invocations of “global citizenship,” the GMS is also worth understanding for those of us living outside of it because it is an integral part of the broader world in which processes of “globalization” and “regionalization” are occurring. Like other world regions, the GMS is being conceptually produced with boundaries marking it as a distinct space of development, while transnational capitalist forces move through and beyond it in “scale-jumping” projects of accumulation. The GMS is thus not only inherently important to those who live there and/or feel connected to it—it provides a window onto important economic, political, and sociocultural integration processes that affect all of us, irrespective of where we live and where our interests take us. I hope that a book on the GMS can therefore serve as a true metaphor for the world in which we all live. ...

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