Journal Articles by Qingfei Yin
Between the mountains, the city, and the world: the microhistory of a ‘Small Third Front’ Chinese arsenal during Revolution and reform
Labor History, 2023
This article presents a microhistory of Dongfang Arsenal, a Small Third Front project in Beijing,... more This article presents a microhistory of Dongfang Arsenal, a Small Third Front project in Beijing, using archival sources, gazetteers, memoirs compiled by former workers, and oral history. It focuses on how the arsenal’s former workers engaged with socialist modernity and tangibly experienced the changing relationship between China and the outside world. It examines the military-industrial complex as a physical micro-space for employment, political mobilisation, and later a collective memory site. Built upon existing studies of the Third Front and emerging research on negotiated state power in socialist enterprises, the article demonstrates how the Third Front’s internally stratified industrial labour force creatively navigated the physical and institutional urban-rural divide by employing collective bargaining power. It also offers an insight into how an industrial, close-knit community and the society related to it experienced the Cultural Revolution. Additionally, it discusses the Front employees’ experience and the arsenal’s struggle for survival during the transition between various socio-economic regimes, bringing together the history of Maoist revolutionary modernisation and post-Maoist reform.
TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2020
The year 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Mak... more The year 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Making use
of published and unpublished Chinese, Vietnamese, and English sources, this article traces the tensions
between official and popular memories of the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 in China and Vietnam, respectively.
We argue that these tensions existed because the development of the official Chinese and Vietnamese
memories of the war largely mirrored each other. Between 1991 and roughly 2006, when bilateral relations
between the countries improved, both Beijing and Hanoi claimed victory for their side while simultaneously
downplaying the bloodshed, tragedy, and loss experienced during the war. However, they have reacted to the
rise of popular memories since the early 2000s in very different ways. While Beijing walks a thin line between
accommodating appeals for greater recognition of the sacrifices made by ordinary soldiers without provoking
social discontent with the political system, Hanoi has been more successful in mobilising Vietnamese popular
memory of the war to strike a measured nationalistic response to China. How China and Vietnam remember
and downplay the Sino-Vietnamese War points to the bigger picture of the sensitivity of bilateral relations to
historical memory in Asia. In particular, historical memory shapes how a country perceives external threats
and opportunities, while historical memory is created, suppressed, and re-created as international relations
evolve.
Modern Asian Studies, 2020
This article studies the collaboration between the Chinese and Vietnamese communists in the socia... more This article studies the collaboration between the Chinese and Vietnamese communists in the socialist transformation of their shared borderlands after the First Indochina War. It both complicates and clarifies the volatile bilateral relationship between the two emerging communist states as they solidified their power in the 1950s. Departing from traditional narratives of Sino-Vietnamese relations which focus on wars and conflicts, this article examines how the timely convergence of Cold War and state expansion transformed the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands from 1954 to 1957. Using both Chinese and Vietnamese archival sources, it contends that the Chinese and Vietnamese communists pursued two interrelated goals in carrying out the political projects at the territorial limits of their countries. First, they wanted to build an inward-looking economy and society at the respective borders by consolidating the national administration of territory. Second, they wanted to impose a contrived Cold War comradeship between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in place of the organic interdependence of people within the borderlands that had existed in the area for centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese border, therefore, was the focus of joint state-building by the two communist governments, which made the cross-border movement of people and goods more visible, manipulable, and, more importantly, taxable.
The Mountain Is High, and the Emperor Is Far Away: States and Smuggling Networks at the Sino-Vietnamese Border
Asian Perspective, 2018
The intense and volatile relations between China and Vietnam in the dyadic world of the Cold War ... more The intense and volatile relations between China and Vietnam in the dyadic world of the Cold War have drawn scholarly attention to the strategic concerns of Beijing and Hanoi. In this article I move the level of analysis down to the border space where the peoples of the two countries meet on a daily basis. I examine the tug-of-war between the states and smuggling networks on the Sino-Vietnamese border during the second half of the twentieth century and its implications for the present-day bilateral relationship. I highlight that the existence of the historically nonstate space was a security concern for modernizing states in Asia during and after the Cold War, which is an understudied aspect of China's relations with Vietnam and with its Asian neighbors more broadly. The border issue between China and its Asian neighbors concerned not only territorial disputes and demarcation but also the establishment of state authority in marginal societies.
Book Reviews by Qingfei Yin
Review of CONTESTED TERRITORY: DIEN BIEN PHU AND THE MAKING OF NORTHWEST VIETNAM
Journal of Military History, 2019
Review of BY MORE THAN PROVIDENCE: GRAND STRATEGY AND AMERICAN POWER IN THE ASIA PACIFIC SINCE 1783
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2020
Review of CHINA'S WAR ON SMUGGLING: LAW, ECONOMIC LIFE, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN STATE, 1842-1965
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, 2019
Review of THE CHINA MISSION: THE GEORGE MARSHALL'S UNFINISHED WAR, 1945-1947
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews, 2019
Review of MAKING BORDERS IN MODERN EAST ASIA
China and Asia A Journal in Historical Studies, 2019
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Journal Articles by Qingfei Yin
of published and unpublished Chinese, Vietnamese, and English sources, this article traces the tensions
between official and popular memories of the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 in China and Vietnam, respectively.
We argue that these tensions existed because the development of the official Chinese and Vietnamese
memories of the war largely mirrored each other. Between 1991 and roughly 2006, when bilateral relations
between the countries improved, both Beijing and Hanoi claimed victory for their side while simultaneously
downplaying the bloodshed, tragedy, and loss experienced during the war. However, they have reacted to the
rise of popular memories since the early 2000s in very different ways. While Beijing walks a thin line between
accommodating appeals for greater recognition of the sacrifices made by ordinary soldiers without provoking
social discontent with the political system, Hanoi has been more successful in mobilising Vietnamese popular
memory of the war to strike a measured nationalistic response to China. How China and Vietnam remember
and downplay the Sino-Vietnamese War points to the bigger picture of the sensitivity of bilateral relations to
historical memory in Asia. In particular, historical memory shapes how a country perceives external threats
and opportunities, while historical memory is created, suppressed, and re-created as international relations
evolve.
Book Reviews by Qingfei Yin