In hindsight, China's shift towards a more aggressive stance towards its neighbours might be traced to that infamous ASEAN meeting in 2010, when China's foreign minister barked at his counterparts that his is the big country, you are small, “and that's just a fact.” This broke with China's longstanding official policy of mutual respect and non-interference – and, of “biding its time.” Today, and especially after China scorned the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which favoured the Philippines in the South China Sea, and after China went on to build and militarize its own artificial islands there (having promised never to do so), it is clear that the stakes involved in being China's neighbour have risen drastically.

This book on the Chinese in Southeast Asia is therefore most timely. It offers a precious “bottom-up perspective” on the multifaceted developments on the ground across Southeast Asia that have accompanied, and in some ways have even driven, the big shift.

Prefaced by a foreword by Wang Gungwu, the book presents 11 contributions that deal with all Southeast Asian countries except Brunei. It ranges topically from Chinese strategic investors to Hui Muslim religious entrepreneurs, and to the all-important transnational water governance issues.

Wang Gungwu sets the stage by reminding us of the historical tension between Chinese state goals and state suspicion of free-wheeling migrants and entrepreneurs. Such tensions go back to imperial times. Wang might have mentioned how imperial authorities, wary of entrepreneurs gaining a power base of their own, forbade them to run mines, and so on. In contrast, today's state authorities seem confident that allowing armies of movers and shakers go out and create new facts on the ground will ultimately be more useful than harmful to their goals in the geopolitical arena.

Intriguingly, in their introduction the editors seize on the mysterious vanishing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 as an event encapsulating the present situation as both new and old, at the same time. The passengers were mostly Chinese entrepreneurs and tourists; bereaved relatives were outraged at the usual lack of information and censorship at home; but Chinese state media partly succeeded in deflecting the blame towards Malaysia (which mishandled the case, too). When some Chinese then burned Malaysia's flag, as if it could be blamed for the disappearance itself, Malaysians were appalled and, for their part, began recalling long-standing “big China” worries that are obviously never far from the surface.

The editors do a good job in summarizing the investment streams and people flows. But they skip a bit too quickly past the different theories about China's global “rise.” They overlook the highly relevant and powerful analyses that world-systems scholars such as Jonathan Friedman have produced of the interlinkages of capital accumulation, hegemonic shifts and identity formation. They do mention findings from international relations, economics and political science (which this reviewer finds much less powerful).

But the editors are correct in their justification for the book's “bottom-up perspective”: too many international-relations studies dwell on investment statistics and politicians’ speeches; if we deal only in such aspects (or, worse, mistake them for the whole truth rather than part-spectacle), we'll surely underestimate the developments on the ground. This includes “the impact of face to face encounters” between new kinds of migrants and locals across Southeast Asia. These can become significant in ways that we could not predict, even if history is indeed once again repeating itself.

The ensuing essays are divided into four parts. They all deliver on the volume's promises, in both expected and unexpected ways – that is the value of field research. The chapters in the first part, “Identities,” explore the influx of Chinese migrants transforming the ethnoscapes of Southeast Asia. Pál Nyíri describes how monied investors are reshaping and realigning Chineseness in Cambodia; Brenda Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin explore the transformation of Singapore by new migrants; and Hew Wai Weng focuses on Chinese Muslim “pious entrepreneurs” in Malaysia and Indonesia, who often play on their connection to Zheng He, the 15th-century ocean-farer.

The section “Livelihoods,” explores the burgeoning trans-border trade and the allures of border crossings. Aranya Siriphon writes on the new traders’ landscape emerging in northern Thailand; Caroline Grillot and Juan Zhang examine the sex trade on the Vietnamese border, including how it plays out through neo-Orientalist imaginaries.

The “Norms” section brings four powerful chapters on Chinese norm-altering interventions. Caroline Hau writes about Sino-Filipino elite entanglements in the Philippines, clearly with lessons for the study of Chinese business penetration elsewhere around the world. Danielle Tan contributes an essay on the strangely extra-territorial Chinese enclaves built as “sites of exception” in Laos. Kevin Woods provides a “multi-scalar” analysis of Chinese investments in the crony-shadowy economies of Burma. Oliver Hensengerth writes about how China is engineering the transformation of Mekong's waters from a social good into an “economic” good, displacing earlier concerns with the environment. In this process, local elites and Chinese companies win, displaced farmers and others lose.

Lastly, the section “Aspirations” turns to Southeast Asians’ imaginaries about what China could mean for them. Johanes Herlijanto describes Indonesian hopes for “learning from China,” and Chris Lyttleton discusses the transnational “affective economies” that structure such yearnings, as well as those of the Chinese. Revisiting and focusing on the forces of such fantasies is a most fitting roundup to a well-edited volume.

All in all, this is a highly imaginative and valuable book, both for students of Asia as well as for those working on other parts of the world – since Southeast Asia is “a crucial observation field to describe the diversity of actors engaged in shaping the Chinese century, as it … plays out … on the ground” (p. 15).