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This chapter first surveys the close historical ties between the governments of China and Cambodia, as well as between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). It then presents data on Cambodia’s dependence on Chinese “aid” and other forms of capital, including foreign direct investment (FDI). It argues that both the relatively high levels of Chinese funding as well as the “no strings attached” nature of that funding, which lacks the conditions for political and economic reforms often attached to foreign aid by other governments and multilateral institutions, provide additional leverage for China over Hun Sen’s government. The chapter shows how China uses this leverage both to help its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) overcome the high risk in Cambodia’s investment environment for their very specific (immobile) assets and to gain the support of the Cambodian government on issues vital to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea. The chapter specifically analyses cases of Chinese investments in Cambodian hydropower projects and shows how Chinese influence over the Cambodian government helps overcome domestic opposition to these projects and secures long-term guarantees for the profitability of investments in this sector.

This chapter presents a comparative study of politics and political institutions in Cambodia and the Philippines, which were long at the extremes within ASEAN regarding whether the members should work collectively to negotiate with China over competing South China Sea claims. Noting the similarities in informal political institutions in both states, including high levels of corruption and the dominance of family dynasties of both political economies, the chapter, nevertheless, emphasizes the differences in formal political institutions in the two countries, as well as the oligarchic political competition of elite families in the Philippines, termed “dynastic pluralism” compared to the dominance of Hun Sen’s family through intermarriage in Cambodia. While patron-clientelism is entrenched in both systems, the chapter argues, in the Philippines there are many more patrons. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Cambodia’s even more corrupt environment and less democratic institutions provide relatively wider avenues for Chinese influence over Cambodia’s government.

This chapter refers to the volunteer university student land surveyors who formed the front line of the state in the land titling reform. It discusses the prime minister's ability to sidestep local officials and gain the trust of rural land claimants, which depended on the mobilization of the student volunteers. It also draws on interviews with the volunteer students to argue that they were central to the way the land reform reproduced Hun Sen's personal power. The chapter agues that the unusual power of university volunteers to make decisions and bypass local officials lay in their position as the prime minister's youth. It explains that the student volunteers' power arose from their “in-between-ness” and their category as both youth and soldier since they have the technological sophistication and militarized garb to clarify the political power and threat they embodied.

This chapter demonstrates how uncertainty over land relations is productive for state power. It explores the multiple understandings of state, land, and power that play out in men's and women's everyday lives in rural Cambodia. It also elaborates the key roles land plays in the enduring rule of Cambodia's prime minister, Hun Sen, the world's longest-serving prime minister. The chapter describes Cambodia's uplands as a frontier for rapacious capital with the government allocating massive logging and economic land concessions to investors, which resulted in the widespread displacement of rural people, the loss of ancestral lands, and a pillaging of the nation's forests. It argues that Cambodia's hierarchical and extractive political economic system is maintained through a politics of fear, violence, and uncertainty.

This chapter discusses the international dimensions of Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, especially the evolution of the Soviet policy toward the Indochina conflict in the course of the 1980s. Gorbachev was interested in ending the war because he resented the economic burden of occupation, passed through Vietnam onto the Soviet Union. But, despite the Chinese demands, he was careful not to pressure Hanoi because he valued Vietnam as a strategic Soviet outpost in Southeast Asia.