A Bit More Detail

CNBC's Nyshka Chandran suggests that the Greater Mekong Subregion, uniting southwesternmost China with mainland Southeast Asia, may become a major manufacturing region as Chinese wages rise while the region integrates. It might be worth considering this in the context of China's potential emergence as an immigration destination, with Southeast Asian countries being plausible sources of migrants.

What will come in the future?

"With China's industrial heartland in the coastal regions of the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta facing increasing pressures on competitiveness due to rising labor costs, the GMS offers considerable potential as an alternative location for the establishment of low cost manufacturing," Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Global Insight, said in a note last week.

Biswas estimates the region's combined gross domestic product (GDP) at $1.1 trillion this year, larger than in Indonesia, Southeast Asia's most populous country. By 2015, the region is forecast to grow 6.2 percent and hit a combined GDP of $3 trillion by 2024. The area currently accounts for less than 5 percent of global manufacturing in value-added terms, but IHS notes that infrastructure is key to realizing the region's potential.

"If infrastructure connectivity is strengthened in Southeast Asia to allow high-speed rail networks and modern roads to link provinces such as Yunnan in southern China to the Indian Ocean via Thailand and Myanmar, this could significantly improve freight logistics...and create significant opportunities for the development of major ports and free trade zones in Thailand and Myanmar, boosting their economic development as entrepots."

While China still enjoys retains its reputation as the world's leading production center, its slowing economy and double-digit wage increases are causing foreign firms to look to Asia's frontier economies.

Kensington Market is located just east of downtown Toronto's main Chinatown, and accordingly the district has a large Chinese presence. I remember when once, walking with bitterlawngnome, I spotted these two community institutions and was excited: as I had learned while studying for my anthropology bachelor's degree, chain migration did visibly exist! (On PEI, not so much.) bitterlawngnome didn't understand why I was so excited. The Fu-Kien Society of Ontario Canada and the Hainan Association of Ontario Canada and the Lao Chinese Association of Toronto were my three proofs at the time.

Fu-Kien Society Of Ontario Canada, 171 Augusta Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Hainan Association of Ontario Canada, 217 Augusta Avenue and Lao Chinese Association of Toronto, 215 Avenue Street
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei