The global demand for land-based raw materials, products and energy have increased the commercial and environmental pressures on land, especially in resource-rich frontier regions. Such land pressures are increasingly influenced by complex socioeconomic and environmental interactions that transcend spatial, institutional and temporal scales. Transnational land acquisitions constitute one manifestation of these pressures that currently shape land use change and threatens land access and land-based livelihoods among rural populations in many places around the world. Creating a better understanding of the complex processes that drive such land acquisitions and increase the contemporary land pressures is thus crucial. This thesis contributes to advancing this agenda in two ways. First, it examines a recent boom in banana cultivation in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR driven by Chinese investors leasing land from Lao farmers and exporting the bananas to China. This type of small-scale and short-term land acquisitions has so far received little scholarly attention. Second, it critically engages with the recently established telecoupling framework proposed in Land System Science as an analytical framework for dealing with distal socioeconomic and environmental interactions. Based on fieldwork in Laos using ethnographic methods, and on qualitative analyses, the thesis examines two banana plantations in a small rural community in Luang Namtha Province and traces the actors, mechanisms and processes driving the banana expansion. Using the telecoupling framework as a heuristic device, the study illuminates how multiple and co-constitutive economic, environmental, political and discursive interactions influence the push for banana into Luang Namtha Province. Furthermore, the in-depth place-based analyses reveal how geographical, biophysical and social contextual factors ground and shape these interactions in this particular location. In this case, the distal interactions are mediated through a cross-border network of Chinese companies and private investors with social ties in the local area, as well as in the fruit market in China. The study shows that the strategies used by the investors to obtain access to the land combined with the resulting destructive land use conversion amount to a strong alienation of land from the villagers. By engaging empirically, methodologically and conceptually with the telecoupling framework, the thesis demonstrates the value of qualitative analysis for capturing some of the more elusive and immaterial interactions, as well as potential feedbacks influencing land use change in a globalised world.