Transcending banana investments: Unraveling the hidden dynamics of Chinese land investment in Laos

High demand in the Chinese fruit market has driven Chinese entrepreneurs to invest in it across Southeast Asia, leading to the "fruit booms." As these investments have extended beyond crop production, they have gradually reshaped the entrepreneurs’ roles into being long-term land-based investors. Past studies have primarily focused on land deals and their impacts, but few have considered the interactions, development, and transformations of these entrepreneurs. This study addresses this gap by examining the dynamics between diverse social networks of entrepreneurs and land control mechanisms. This is done using eight months of fieldwork in Laos, analyzing the investment expansion cases of three Chinese banana entrepreneurs and describing how they leveraged social networks to facilitate their land investments. The study identifies three distinct banana investment trajectories: (1) flexibly investing in emerging profitable crops through Chinese business networks, (2) diversifying land investments through local government networks, and (3) implementing short-term subleasing on large-scale lands by combining business and government networks. Land access, expansion, and redistribution across different regions are central to these investment trajectories. Social networks play a critical role in shaping the evolving dynamics of land control by facilitating these land-related processes. These findings contribute to more nuanced descriptions of the micro-level dynamics through which entrepreneurs engage in land investment and shape agrarian transitions in the Global South.