Dreaming the ‘Chinese dream’: Local productions of and engagements with Chinese infrastructures in Northern Laos Simon Rowedder Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this article zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infra- structural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infra- structures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim. At the crossroads of the ‘Kunming–Bangkok Highway’ (R3 highway in Laos) and ‘Kunming–Vientiane Railway’, or ‘China–Laos Railway’ (opened in December 2021), the northern Lao border province of Luang Namtha is developing into a regional hub linking China with Thailand, directly contributing to Laos’ national vision of moving from a land-locked towards a land-linked country. Dr Phimmasone Leuangkhamma, then-governor of Luang Namtha province, outlines the vision for his province as follows: Luang Namtha Province (LNT) [is] located in [a] strategic location and bordered [sic] with China (157 km) and Myanmar (130 km). The road R3 connects China and Thailand via Borkeo [sic] and Luang Namtha Provinces. We can say that LNT is [a] stra- tegic connecting point to three nearby countries that are big markets for LNT goods. This strategic location will turn LNT to become [a] logistics hub and center of trans- border transportation of goods and services in [the] near future. 1 Simon Rowedder is an Assistant Professor at the University of Passau. Correspondence in connection with this article should be addressed to: simon.rowedder@uni-passau.de. The author would like to thank Darren Byler, Tim Oakes, Yang Yang, Tim Bunnell and Rachel Silvey who convened the third ‘China Made Workshop: The social life of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia’, 17–20 May 2021, at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore, to which this article con- tributed. He would also like to thank Dorothy Tang for her thoughtful and constructive feedback on earl- ier versions of this article. 1 Department of Planning and Investment (DPI), Investment potentials and opportunities: Luang Namtha province (Luang Namtha: Dept of Planning and Investment of Luang Namtha, 2013). Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, page 1 of 20 2024. 1 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The National University of Singapore doi:10.1017/S0022463424000298 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463424000298 Published online by Cambridge University Press