A custom visualization depicting a novel dataset of cross-border investments from China's Opium Replacement plan. The plan aims to displace the economic niche of opium cultivation through capitalized alternative agricultural ventures, ideally making it more profitable to cultivate legal agricultural exports to China than illicit exports.

The map uses relational GIS principles to show the spatial relationships between peripheral centers in China and target geographies. The precise location of each project isn't known in greater precision than province or subprovince level, so mapping can be difficult. Drawing a line between the headquarter city and the target geography abstracts the economic relationship, and scattering the project points gives the correct impression of spatial distribution.

This map was featured in the BTAA Big 10 GIS Conference in November 2022. An edited version appeared in Peripheral centers: vertical politics and the geography of Chinese cross-border opium replacement in Southeast Asia’s “New Golden Triangle”, (Juliet Lu & Michael Dwyer).