Laotian Phoumy: Doing transnational business with her Chinese husband

At dawn, the daily hustle and bustle at Mohan Port begins, waking up a Lao woman named Phoumy Fengdaloun and her 60-day-old baby. Located near the China-Laos border in Yunnan’s southernmost county of Mengla, Mohan Port sees long queues of passengers and freight vehicles waiting for customs clearance every morning.

Mohan Port

Phoumy owns a 60-square-metre store, which sells Lao specialties and Thai products to Chinese customers. The Lancang-Mekong Department Store is located on ASEAN Thoroughfare, a major road in Mohan. The roadside two-story stores form an international street where products from China and ASEAN countries are traded.

In 2003, border trade in Mohan began to rise. It was in that year when 23-year-old Phoumy started her cross-border business, setting up a Lao goods stall in Mohan. At that time, she entered China in the morning and returned to Laos in the afternoon. The same year, Phoumy got to know Gao Lei, a young man from Mengla who was also doing cross-border trade in Mohan. They fell in love with each other. In 2006, the two got married in China and settled down.

"At first, the Kunming-Bangkok Highway was incomplete, and business was not good enough, but we could make ends meet anyway," Phoumy said. The couples’ business began to thrive with the increase of China-Laos border traffic in 2008, when the Kunming-Bangkok Highway was finished and opened. By the end of 2008, they had spent more than 300,000yuan buying a two-story store. The downstairs is for business and the upstairs for living.

Over the past two years, progress has been made in building the Mengla key pilot zone for development and opening-up, as well as the China-Laos Mohan-Boten Economic Cooperation Zone. Also, the Simao-Xiaomengyang Highway connected to Mohan was upgraded, and construction of the China-Laos Railway is in full swing. As a result, business at Phoumy’s store has been booming, with popular Lao lotions and handmade soap sold to other Chinese provinces via local e-commerce platforms. "Our annual income has been on the rise," said Phoumy.

Reporting by Dai Zhenhua; trans-editing by Wang Shixue