Introduction: border-making projects and the Cold War

The Sino-Vietnamese border endured ‘one of the most intense and volatile bilateral relations in Asia’ during the Cold War, when relations between the two countries developed from ‘revolutionary collaboration, national alliance, armed hostility’ to ‘normalization’.Footnote ¹ Existing historiography on Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Cold War focuses almost exclusively on higher-level diplomacy between Beijing and Hanoi during the Indochina wars.Footnote ² The South China Sea disputes further reinforce the tendency of scholars to focus on the sources of recent political animosity and territorial contention between China and Vietnam.Footnote ³ An understudied yet important topic is how the Chinese and Vietnamese communists conceived and launched the political projects of border-making as they assumed power in their respective countries. This article fills this historiographical gap by concentrating more on the collaboration between the Chinese and Vietnamese communists in the socialist transformation of their shared borderlands after the First Indochina War. It reveals that, on the one hand, not all interactions between Beijing and Hanoi centred on war or preparation for war; on the other hand, the two communist states encountered security challenges along their boundaries that were, in fact, not always disputed.Footnote ⁴

This article makes three historiographical interventions. First, it extends the temporal scope of scholarship on the history of the Sino-Vietnamese border, especially concerning how Chinese and Vietnamese states established themselves there during the modern era. In her study of relations between Ming China and Vietnam, Kathlene Baldanza argues that negotiation, instead of aggression and resistance, was the central theme in the formation of ‘the cultural, historical, and political borders of the two countries’.Footnote ⁵ Vũ Đường Luân's examination of border disputes between the Nguyễn and Qing courts reveals that the quest for autonomy by local communities at the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands ‘led to the intervention by and expansion of these two states, as well as negotiations and territorial division between them’.Footnote ⁶ Certain local groups also served as powerbrokers of the state. As Bradley Camp Davis illustrates, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the imperial states of China, Vietnam, and the French protectorate all recruited bandits to extend power into the China-Vietnam borderlands.Footnote ⁷ Although the Tai and other ethnic groups in the Black River Basin enjoyed controlled autonomy under colonial rule, the traditional leaders such as chief heads gradually lost their power with the rise of the modern Vietnamese state during the anti-colonial war.Footnote ⁸ However, this scholarship has mainly focused on the period before the second half of the twentieth century. This article shows that during the communist era, the two neighbouring communist states collaborated in their political projects of border-making, which made it increasingly difficult for the local community to maintain autonomy.

Second, this article seeks to contribute to the productive historiography on institutional processes that helped states to expand their power into borderlands in different parts of the world, and to explore the challenges that centralizing governments confronted there. Recent scholarship on borderlands favours a cross-border perspective in order to study ‘the region on both sides of a state border as the unit of analysis’.Footnote ⁹ In his study of the Pyrenean frontier between France and Spain, Peter Sahlins stresses that ‘states did not simply impose the boundary or the nation on local society’. Instead, by ‘defining their own social and territorial boundaries, village communities, peasants and nobles, made use of the national state and its boundaries’, therefore ‘bringing the nation into the village’.Footnote ¹⁰ In North America, the study of borderlands intersects well with Native American and environmental history.Footnote ¹¹ Cooperation between neighbouring countries in boundary-making was important in the formation of American borders. In her study of the western border between Mexico and the United States, Rachel St. John analyses their ‘shared binational experience’ to subdue Apaches and land pirates in the borderlands and to promote capitalist growth in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹² A similar binational project also took place at the Sino-Vietnamese border in the 1950s but it was driven by a different ideology and a strong sense of regime insecurity. This article thus enters the conversation between historians who focus on different geographical areas regarding the various motives of state-building at the borderlands.

Third, by crafting a narrative of twentieth century border-making projects in the dyadic world of the Cold War, this article contributes to a ‘pericentric view’,Footnote ¹³ which goes beyond the study of strategic calculations of the great powers. Cold War historians have often framed the rise and fall of the troubled partnership between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in terms of the evolving American-Sino-Soviet strategic triangle. The two communist countries, united in their shared perception of an American threat in the 1950s, drifted apart as Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated in the 1960s, and eventually became adversaries as a result of the rapprochement between China and the United States.Footnote ¹⁴ Diplomatic historians, nevertheless, have paid scant attention to the way in which Sino-Vietnamese relations were also driven by significant efforts to tackle the legacy of empires and colonialism. Building on recent scholarship on state-society relations in Asian borderlands during the Cold War,Footnote ¹⁵ this article stresses that ideological conflicts between communism and capitalism shaped the communists’ political projects to cut cross-border ties that were often deemed capitalist.

This article contends that the Chinese and Vietnamese communists pursued two interrelated goals in carrying out political projects at the territorial limits of their countries. First, they wanted to build an inward-looking economy and society at their respective borders by consolidating the national administration of territory. Second, they wanted to impose a contrived Cold War comradeship between the PRC and the DRV in place of the organic interdependence of people within the borderlands which had existed in the area for centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese border, therefore, encountered 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.

With the end of the First Indochina War, the first step towards meeting these goals was the establishment of communist institutions, characterized by the nationalization of trade, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restriction on migration on both sides of the border. As a result, border residents found it increasingly difficult to circumvent the state by exploiting the different political situations in the two countries, as they had done in the past. Even so, the two communist states confronted a twofold challenge at their borderlands. First, the state extended its reach to the border not in a uniform fashion but through its discrete parts, which generated the problem of coordination within the bureaucracy, particularly between the centre and local administrations. Second, the more culturally diverse and fluid on-the-ground realities of borderlands fitted neither the nationalist nor the internationalist agenda of the two states.

The Sino-Vietnamese border was a geographically diverse area that consisted of shared access to the Gulf of Tonkin and a land border ranging from lower valleys to mountainous highlands. This article focuses on the hilly lowland border along Guangxi and Guangdong in China and along Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn, and Hải Ninh in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶ Whereas the upland geography of Yunnan/northwestern Vietnam was conducive to political autonomy against the central authority, the lowland border was the site of more ambitious state-building projects. After the end of the Sino-French War (1883–1885), both the French colonial government of Indochina and successive Chinese central regimes and military strongmen (following the fall of the Qing dynasty) made determined efforts to exercise control in this borderland area. Wars and conflicts during the first half the twentieth century, however, rolled back many of these attempts. In short, the eastern part of the Sino-Vietnamese border witnessed complex state-society interactions, which allows for a more complex examination of the continuities and discontinuities in state-building and local resistance.

This article focuses on the initial years after the First Indochina War, from the Geneva Conference in the summer of 1954 to the end of 1957. In the mid-1950s, the international relations of East Asia and the domestic politics of the PRC and the DRV enjoyed a period of relative stability.Footnote ¹⁷ With the end of the Korean War in July 1953, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shifted away from a radically revolutionary perception of international affairs and adopted a more modest direction in its foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁸ To break diplomatic isolation and create a favourable international environment for domestic consolidation, Premier Zhou Enlai opened dialogues with France and Great Britain at the Geneva Conference, introduced the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence with India and Burma, and called for cooperation between Asian and African countries at the 1955 Bandung Conference. Meanwhile, China's First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) set ambitious economic objectives, including promoting socialist industrialization through Soviet-assisted projects, developing agricultural cooperatives, and establishing state capitalism in commerce.Footnote ¹⁹ The DRV, emerging victorious from the First Indochina War, likewise faced the pressing issue of regime consolidation. The Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) took a pragmatic ‘North-first’ policy to preclude American intervention and to heal the wounds of war.Footnote ²⁰ In late 1954 and early 1955, DRV leaders formulated the Three-Year Plan for Economic Recovery (1955–1957), with land reform at its centre.Footnote ²¹ The shared priorities of economic growth, political centralization, and regional stability geared Beijing and Hanoi towards more concerted efforts to increase their institutional presence at the border.

This article begins with an examination of the development of border police and the institutionalization of border authorities. This initiated a process that transformed the Sino-Vietnamese frontiers from less monitored spaces to areas subject to particular regimes of regulation, discipline, control, and surveillance. It then traces how the end of the First Indochina War changed the communist perception of the cross-border trade networks and shows how the two governments collaborated in marginalizing private commerce at the border markets. More importantly, Chinese and Vietnamese officials decided to turn their respective border societies inwards by severing the existing transnational social ties, which will be studied in the third part of this article. The two communist states, however, had to find a balance between the construction of socialism and political realism on the ground. A 1956 meeting of representatives of border provinces, examined at the end of the article, reveals a series of challenges to the political projects of communist border-making.

Watch out for the enemy inside: the development of border police

One of the first projects of the modernizing central states was to establish a system to ensure disciplined border guards who would selectively block flows of people, ideas, and goods across the border. The people of the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands had long been partners in realms such as trade, agriculture, and marriage. In particular, the activities of bandits, smugglers, and political opponents at the border concerned imperial and colonial officials. In 1896, the Qing court and the French colonial government decided to establish postes militaires doubles (duixun in Chinese) at important border-crossings to police the international boundary settled after the Sino-French War. The Chinese-Vietnamese border, however, remained poorly monitored before the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ²² During the First Indochina War, the PRC and the DRV had developed preliminary border garrison systems at their respective borders. The two sides cooperated in crushing remnants of the Chinese Nationalist troops and French colonial forces, while being rather flexible on managing cross-border economic and social connections. After the restoration of peace in Indochina, the two communist states adopted the Soviet model of treating border controls as integral parts of the political institutions that reinforced domestic political stability. Borders epitomized an all-encompassing communist party-state by performing ‘both economic and internal-security functions’. Highly restrictive regulations on cross-border movements ‘complemented the Soviet Union's strong territorial defences, its strict internal surveillance regime, and its state-planned economy’.Footnote ²³

The end of the First Indochina War coincided with a nationwide effort by the Chinese communist state to institutionalize and formalize its border police system. The sixth national meeting of public security in 1954 stipulated that border police forces should ‘integrate the missions of armed patrol, administrative management, and secret surveillance’. Frontier defence, the meeting decided, was ‘not only military defence but also political defence; not only open struggle but also secret struggle; not only the mission of the border police but also the mission of the party, state, military, and people in the border region’.Footnote ²⁴ This broad conceptualization of frontier defence, which encompassed both the internal political stability of China's frontier regions (bianjiang) and the protection of borders (bianjing) from external aggression, reflects China's ethnic geography as an ‘empire state’ and its concerns over unrest at minority-populated frontiers.Footnote ²⁵ Communist China inherited the ‘geo-body’Footnote ²⁶ of the expansionist Qing empire, which had resorted to various empire-building techniques. On its western frontier, Manchu rulers secured their conquest of the eastern part of Central Eurasia by defeating the Zunghars and competing with the Russian empire.Footnote ²⁷ On its southern frontier, the Qing court used more scientific cartography to achieve a more precise delineation of territory and combined ethnographic writings with direct observation to administer the people.Footnote ²⁸ In the Tai-populated southwest Yunnan, although Han migration and military officials were key to the integration of the area into the Qing empire, the strength of the Qing state on the ground was restrained, as it had to compete with the Burmese and Siamese states for authorities and resources.Footnote ²⁹ As the Chinese communists came to power, the southern border assumed strategic importance due to perceived hostility from the outside and challenges to the regime in the newly occupied border provinces.

After the complete French retreat from northern Vietnam, the China-Vietnam border became one between two politically trusted, contiguous countries. The Chinese border police, therefore, downgraded its military function of surveillance and reallocated resources to guarding against potential reactionaries within the country. In late 1954, counties along Guangxi's border began to establish ‘border work committees’ consisting of personnel from the military, the border police and inspection stations, public security, transportation, customs, banks, and trade offices ‘to unify thought and actions in defending and constructing the land and maritime border’.Footnote ³⁰ Such arrangements resulted in problems arising when different branches of the government and the military had their own representatives at the border who received orders from their respective higher authorities without much consultation with each other. Again reflecting a perceived need for coordination, a provincial directive noted that the military task of the border police focused on ‘checking smuggling and illegal immigration, arresting infiltrating and fugitive spies and bandits, and defending against airdrops and air raids’, all of which, however, entailed ‘coordination between state agencies’ and ‘reliance on a mass line’.Footnote ³¹

Cold War concerns, focusing mainly on potential threats from the United States and the Washington-backed Republic of China or Taiwan, also entered into border defence calculations. Citing the establishment of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the coming into force of the Mutual Defence Treaty between the United States and the Republic of China as signs of the former's encirclement of Red China, a Guangxi provincial administration directive in March 1955 required the border counties to guard against American-supported ‘conspiracy against our border area’ and ‘counterrevolutionaries who fled from the inland to the frontier’. It urged all border county administrations to establish ‘border work committees’ at the earliest possible date, and it demarcated a ‘border defence zone’ that encompassed all the border towns.Footnote ³²

Reflecting shifting priorities, the border inspection station of the Friendship Pass, a historical gateway and border marker that connected Pingxiang County in Guangxi with the Vietnamese town of Đồng Đăng in Lạng Sơn,Footnote ³³ removed the branch that was in charge of wartime military surveillance in July 1955.Footnote ³⁴ The border police forces in the coastal county of Qinzhou were required to conduct ‘a thorough investigation of fled or detained counterrevolutionaries, heads of feudal secret societies, families of the counterrevolutionaries, landlords, former Nationalists, and people inclined to be taken advantage of by the enemies, such as habitual criminals and vagabonds’.Footnote ³⁵ By crushing possible conspiracies between its internal and external enemies, the Chinese communist state sought to transform its southwestern border from a historical asylum for politically ostracized individuals into a socialist stronghold against the perceived aggression of the capitalist camp.

Besides detecting and suppressing potentially subversive activities, controlling the cross-border activities of the local populations became an important item on the agenda of the border police forces. During the First Indochina War, the border authority was required ‘to show consideration to the economic lives of the two peoples’,Footnote ³⁶ which resulted in rather flexible state intervention into the cross-border networks. Furthermore, a lack of experience in border inspections and knowledge of local culture and geography left the border police with little expertise in enforcing the borderline. Even so, there was a tendency towards growing institutionalization of border regulation. In December 1954, Fangcheng County decided to place more stringent restrictions on border people who visited families and friends, attended seasonal fairs, obtained firewood, or transported buffaloesFootnote ³⁷ across the border. It prohibited the border people from crossing the border along unpatrolled trails or passes not officially opened for travel. For those facing economic difficulties, only people living within 20 kilometres of the borderline in possession of a temporary visa were permitted to exit the country at designated places. Meanwhile, only traders from Vietnam with documents issued by the Vietnamese authorities would still be allowed to enter China.Footnote ³⁸ As revealed in the next section, with the nationwide collectivization of the economy, cross-border economic connections were soon deemed feudalist, opportunistic, and unpredictable.

Although the VWP took similar steps in institutionalizing its border police, it was more lenient over spontaneous cross-border connections with communist China than with other neighbouring countries. In October 1955, the DRV's Ministry of Public Security convened a meeting with the border police where it admitted that ‘the organization of the Vietnamese border garrison [was] weak, and the control of the local party committees on border defence [was] not tight, which [left] many loopholes for enemies to take advantage of’. The meeting stipulated that the mission of the border police was ‘to incorporate the three aspects of administrative management, secret surveillance, and armed patrols under the leadership of the Party Central, with reliance on the people, and in close collaboration with other departments’.Footnote ³⁹ The wording of this statement showed the clear impact of the Chinese military doctrine of border defence which treated the inspection of cross-border activities and the transformation of border societies as inseparable.

Such concerns can be seen in a number of cases and actions. In July 1956, the Vietnamese border police were required to investigate the geography, population, and society of the borderland and the coast; more specifically, they were required ‘to strike hard on the conspiracy between the imperialists and the bandits at sea’. On the land border, the DRV government prescribed that the area around 20 kilometres from the borderline with China fell under the administration of the border police, whereas the border defence zone with Laos was expanded to 50 kilometres due to the absence of diplomatic relations between the DRV and the Royal Lao government. At the Vietnam-China border, the focal point of border regulation was to carry out regular inspections at border ports such as Móng Cái, Đồng Đǎng, Tà Lùng, and Lào Cai. Among the communities bordering Laos, by contrast, the border police were to closely monitor the activities of dwellers who sought to enter Laos to visit families or purchase necessities. Local officials were expected to conduct a thorough investigation at the border communes, make lists, and create profiles of people engaged in cross-border activities, and only permit politically reliable people to travel to Laos.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Chinese-Vietnamese border acquired even greater importance for Beijing and Hanoi after the railway systems of the two countries were connected near the Friendship Pass in 1955.Footnote ⁴¹ In November 1951, the PRC extended its Hunan-Guangxi railroad to the Guangxi-Vietnam border to transport military aid to the Viet Minh. The section within Guangxi was among the first railways to be constructed by the revolutionary regime, indicating the high priority of supporting the DRV on China's political agenda. In the mid-1950s, connecting the Vietnamese transportation system with the socialist bloc was vital to the economic recovery of the DRVFootnote ⁴² because the country was located at the periphery of the socialist camp and was geographically separated from the Soviet Union by China. In December 1954, the DRV decided to repair the railroad between Hanoi and Đồng Đăng and link the line with the main Chinese rail network near the Friendship Pass.

Under the Agreement of the PRC Assisting the DRV in Repairing Railways, the Chinese Ministry of Railway provided locomotives, vehicles, and other equipment to the DRV and sent technicians and construction teams to restore 166.9 kilometres of the Hanoi-Friendship Pass railroad.Footnote ⁴³ The Vietnamese railroads originally constructed by the French in this area used a 1,000 millimetre (3 foot 3 3⁄8 inch) ‘narrow’ gauge due to the mountainous terrain along the route, whereas the Chinese railroad's standard gauge was 1,435 millimetres (4 foot 8 1⁄2 inches). To solve the problem of different gauges, the two countries agreed to have the Vietnamese narrow-gauge rail extend into Pingxiang, the first rail station within China, where the Chinese would construct a reloading yard to transfer materials between the two tracks.Footnote ⁴⁴ The whole project was completed in February 1955 and the line was officially opened on 1 August 1955. This turned the Guangxi-Vietnam frontier into a bustling land transportation hub between the two communist countries.Footnote ⁴⁵

Along with the growing military and economic significance of remote border towns such as Pingxiang and Đồng Đăng, the two communist states tightened social controls of the area along the railway. Because socialism was a modernization project, communist countries were eager to embrace advanced transportation technologies and to make domestic mobility an instrument of social change. Nonetheless, local administrations were also ‘highly ambivalent in their attitudes toward the opportunities these technologies and mobility offered to their subjects’.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the opening of the Sino-Vietnamese Railway, the border authority at the Friendship Pass took charge of the customs inspections at Pingxiang station. It thoroughly investigated the social conditions around the locality and created detailed records of ‘suspected enemies’. Among those arrested were ordinary people who confessed to plans to flee to Saigon by hopping on a passing train and spies who collected intelligence at the station disguised as railway workers.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Chinese state's close surveillance of the communities along the railroad echoed similar trends on the other side of the boundary line. In June 1955, the VWP decided that agrarian reform in the minority regions would not commence as early as in the ethnic Vietnamese Kinh-populated provinces. However, areas along the Sino-Vietnamese railroad were made an exception to this lenient policy because some of the tribes had collaborated with the French during the First Indochina War.Footnote ⁴⁸

The institutionalization of Chinese and Vietnamese border police systems broadly reflected public security campaigns in the mid-1950s to consolidate border defence in the two adjacent countries. The leaderships of the PRC and the DRV held a disturbing view of frontiers due to an international environment they saw as hostile as well as a determination to eliminate domestic counterrevolutionaries. Although at this time the two communist countries were Cold War partners that did not pose a direct political or military threat to each other, they needed to address the historical legacy of state weakness at the borderlands. Borders, as George Gavrilis argues, are not simply ‘lines of separation between states’ but ‘institutions that directly contribute to state formation and state authority’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Chinese and Vietnamese attempts to buttress national borders through the police systems were as much about preventing internal counterrevolutionaries from escaping the country as about keeping the external enemy out of their territories. Furthermore, the border garrisons, among other border-making institutions, helped the two communist states to exploit the borderlands to their own advantage by hampering long-existing cross-border economic and social ties.

A farewell to business: the marginalization of spontaneous cross-border trade

The cross-border trade in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands operated by the overseas Chinese traders (Huaqiao in Chinese, Hoa kiều in Vietnamese) assumed strategic importance to the central states in the twentieth century. After the fall of Guangzhou and other coastal ports to the Japanese in 1938, the rail lines, highways, and rivers crossing the Sino-Vietnamese border became China's lifeline for the transport of foreign military aid, food supplies, and commercial goods.Footnote ⁵⁰ Likewise, during the initial years of the First Indochina War, overseas Chinese traders and ‘their profoundly trans-national commercial networks running throughout all of Southeast Asia’ played a unique role in sustaining the Viet Minh's struggle against the French by enabling the Vietnamese to procure large amounts of arms, chemicals, medicines, and cotton materials.Footnote ⁵¹ After the PRC became the first country to recognize the DRV in January 1950, the two nations began to establish trade relations at the border. In July 1952, Beijing and Hanoi decided to open several border crossings between China and the ‘liberated zone’ of Vietnam for ‘small-scale border trade’.Footnote ⁵² The two states would levy taxes and stabilize prices at the border markets with the participation of state-run companies. Carrying border trade licences issued by the local administrations, the borderland residents could sell and purchase daily necessities at these markets, and the overseas Chinese traders continued to profit from the cross-border trade.Footnote ⁵³

After the Geneva Agreements put an end to the war between French Union forces and the Viet Minh in summer 1954, the activities of the itinerant merchants became increasingly problematic to the communist states. The ceasefire in Indochina led to a sudden outpouring of Vietnamese products into the Chinese border markets. ‘As the DRV emerged as an integral market thanks to the restored peace and resumed transportation’, according to a report by the state-run West Guangxi Trade Company, merchants (especially overseas Chinese traders) from Hanoi and other major cities were eager to expand their sale northwards to the borderlands to sell off goods overstocked during the war. Responding to this situation, peddlers and store owners from other parts of China, such as Guangdong and Shanghai, travelled to the border to purchase Vietnamese herbs, spices, and dried fish.Footnote ⁵⁴ The rising number of private merchants at the border markets drove up the price of Vietnamese goods and obstructed the state-run enterprises’ plan to purchase the majority of Vietnamese products at fixed low prices (a standard practice of the socialist economy to extract revenues from the agricultural sector to fund the development of heavy industry). Meanwhile, the sales of Chinese light industrial products and salt plummeted after July 1954, reducing the profits of the Chinese state-run companies and weakening the dominance of the public sector in the border economy.Footnote ⁵⁵

Blaming private business for destabilizing border markets, the Chinese state decided to place restrictions on itinerant traders from outside the border area. In late 1954, the Chinese government tried to quarantine the border markets from the rest of the country by not issuing trade licences to people who lived more than 20 kilometres away from the border on the Chinese side.Footnote ⁵⁶ This measure of cracking down on private business led not only to significant growth in market share by local state-run companies but also to the interruption of transnational exchanges between southern China and Indochina. This was a marked example of the state's scheme to define its borders and restructure relations between the borderlands and the interior.

As the state-run companies secured a monopoly at the Chinese border markets through a socialist war on commerce, tensions between the local administrations and the border dwellers heightened. Once the Chinese central state's decision to preclude outside merchants trickled down the bureaucratic hierarchy, the policy translated into ‘a widespread hostility among the cadres against all private shopkeepers’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Guangxi provincial administration, for instance, stipulated that ‘the socialist transformation of the private commerce should be carried out at the border area earlier than that in the inland’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Many local traders in the border towns fell into poverty after late 1954. They were deprived of the right to trade at the border markets and yet ‘were not arranged properly’ to find new methods of making a living.Footnote ⁵⁹ Meanwhile, as a result of the exclusion of private commerce, local farmers had no choice but to sell their goods to the state-run companies. Even the report of the Ministry of Commerce admitted that the procurement price arbitrarily determined by the state-run companies ‘had incurred a negative impact among the masses’. Local people complained that ‘the [state-run] trade companies [forced] prices down more aggressively than the private merchants [had done] during the Nationalist era’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on private merchants, however, did not suffice to guarantee profits for its state-run companies, due to the volatile demand from Vietnam. In April 1955, Chinese state trade agents at Dongxing, a historical trading hub connecting to Vietnam's Móng Cái through a bridge on the Beilun River (Ka Long River in Vietnamese), complained about the unpredictability of the cross-border trade already under their supervision. With Vietnam still a ‘free market’, they reported, ‘our trade is poorly planned. We can hardly draft [a] credible plan because it is hard to obtain reliable information on what exactly the Vietnamese side needs.’Footnote ⁶¹

The awkward situation encountered by the Chinese state-run companies was a striking example of the resilient cross-border commercial networks against the manipulation of the state when the social and economic conditions in the two neighbouring countries differed so significantly. The CCP had consolidated its authority and credibility through a series of political campaigns, especially a nationwide suppression of ‘reactionaries and reactionary activities’ during the Korean War.Footnote ⁶² By contrast, the primary concern of the VWP leaders in the mid-1950s was to avoid alienating the masses who had supported the Viet Minh in its struggle for independence. Hanoi, therefore, adopted a more moderate economic policy. To put the economy on a stable footing after the ceasefire, the VWP decided to leave trade and the handicraft business in private hands.Footnote ⁶³ It was not until the DRV also carried out more determined measures to exclude private traders from the border markets in 1957 that the state-run companies of the two communist countries more seriously undermined the centuries-old transnational trade networks between southern China and Indochina.

Besides competition with the itinerant traders, the Chinese trade companies were trapped in a dilemma of being simultaneously instructed to accumulate wealth for the state, support local livelihoods, and pursue the diplomatic goal of buttressing the DRV. When the CCP and the Viet Minh opened up small-scale trade at the border markets during the First Indochina War, they sought to achieve two objectives. On the one hand, they hoped to maintain the livelihood of the borderland people. On the other hand, they needed to expand markets for Vietnamese products in China to support the Viet Minh's military struggle. Beijing required its state-run companies to buy the vast majority of the goods brought by the Vietnamese to the border markets, regardless of whether China needed them or whether the products were of satisfactory quality. The influx of Vietnamese goods after the end of the war left them severely overstocked with firewood, cane, and bamboo, which were without a ready market in China.Footnote ⁶⁴

Reconciling competing border policies was also complicated when the post-war famine in the DRV made border crossings crucial for Vietnamese supplies of rice, oil, and daily necessities. This reversed Guangxi's historical role as a rice importer from Indochina to that of a rice exporter. Out of internationalist concerns, the state-run Chinese companies adopted different policies towards Chinese and Vietnamese buyers at the border markets. Whereas Chinese citizens had to follow a strict monthly quota for rice and cooking oil, and use coupons to obtain cotton clothes, the Vietnamese could buy 15 kilograms of rice and 250 grams of oil per person and any quantity of cotton clothes they wished.

However, when local officials realized that a sizeable number of buyers from Vietnam were itinerant merchants who resold the rice at Vietnamese markets, where food prices had been driven high by the famine, it imposed a five-kilogram limit on the rice each person from Vietnam could purchase. The Ministry of Commerce, however, overruled this local decision, criticizing the reduced quota as ‘inappropriate’. Worried that failure to help the DRV feed its starving population would compromise the socialist partnership, the Ministry suggested that ‘the provincial government should strengthen support for the border markets regarding grain supply and processing’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This situation highlighted the significant challenge of implementing a centrally framed international strategy of a large country in a local context. The perceived importance of foreign affairs policies sometimes declined as they passed down the bureaucratic hierarchy, especially when carrying out foreign policies that diverted limited resources from other tasks that were deemed locally just as important, if not more—including ensuring the fiscal survival of local state institutions.

In July 1955, Beijing and Hanoi revised the protocol on small-scale border trade and signed a new treaty to establish direct trade relations between local state-run companies. The two agreements marked the coordinated efforts of the two socialist countries to marginalize small-scale border trade and to nationalize the border economy. Earlier that year, Hanoi decided to monopolize the purchase of the major cash crops, such as coffee beans, and tea, following the Chinese model, which helped narrow the price gap between the two countries.Footnote ⁶⁶ With local Chinese and Vietnamese companies able to trade with each other directly, based on seasonal plans, the border markets declined in importance. The objective of the revised protocol, according to the Chinese State Council, was ‘to respond to the DRV's transition into a period of peaceful construction after the ceasefire in Indochina and market change in the small-scale border trade in 1954, to prevent private businessmen from engaging in speculation and profiteering at the border markets, and to supply the means of production and subsistence to the border dwellers on the two sides’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The protocol was explicit that only border residents living within the 20-kilometre radius could attend the border markets, and a daily limit of commodities valued at Yuan Renminbi (RMB) 10 or the equivalent Vietnamese currency (VND) was set.Footnote ⁶⁸ To discourage a private cross-border economy, the DRV abolished an existing tax exemption policy for people who brought commodities under a value of Yuan RMB 5 or equivalent VND.Footnote ⁶⁹

After the revised small-scale border trade protocol and the deals among local state-run companies took effect, both the variety of goods and the number of participants at the border markets dropped significantly. The socialist war on private commerce, however, was not an easy victory, given that even the local state representatives had reservations about the policy of excluding private traders altogether from the border markets. They admitted that private entrepreneurs had competed with state-run companies to purchase Vietnamese products by offering higher prices or placing orders in advance, and some of them may even have undertaken subversive political activities. However, excluding them altogether from the border markets did more harm than good because the state-run companies that focused on monopolizing the trade in major commodities fell short in meeting the daily demand of the border residents, especially regarding medicines, herbs, and buffaloes.Footnote ⁷⁰

By the time the leadership of the two countries had reached the two trade agreements, they already had in mind nationalizing all cross-border trade. Viewing both small-scale border trade and local state-run trade as makeshift and transitional, the two parties set an ambitious goal to gradually incorporate all cross-border transactions into ‘formal, intergovernmental trade’.Footnote ⁷¹ In the spring of 1956, Beijing and Hanoi decided to close all border markets by the end of June 1957, while making allowances for local dwellers to cross the border carrying small numbers of gifts and personal items.Footnote ⁷² Even though the plan was not ultimately carried out, the two communist countries’ ambition to fix people on either side of the borderline by monopolizing the supply of goods was manifested in this aggressive long-term solution to cross-border trade.

Although the cross-border trade networks increasingly became the target of joint inspection and regulation by the two socialist states, the itinerant merchants turned out to be highly resilient in the face of the suppression of private commerce, especially in the DRV. Unlike in China, where businessmen had lost management rights over their enterprises through state-imposed public-private joint ownership, the DRV did not immediately push for a state monopoly of commerce due to concerns about alienating the urban population. It was thus more challenging for Vietnamese officials to block itinerant retailers from using border markets.

In April 1957, the Vietnamese Prime Minister's Office ordered local governments along its border to take tougher measures to exclude ‘greedy merchants’ who ‘take advantage of the shortage of commodities in the domestic markets’. Hanoi blamed stores opened by these traders in the border area for making the border markets ‘disorderly and complicated’.Footnote ⁷³ More importantly, these non-native private shopkeepers had managed to monopolize the Vietnamese border markets and engage in the smuggling of contraband by bribing businessmen, ordinary people, and cadres in order to evade state-imposed trade restrictions. The DRV government, therefore, stipulated in August 1957 that retailers taking commodities to the border from Hanoi, Haiphong, and other non-border areas had to sell their goods to local Vietnamese state-run companies instead of trading directly with the Chinese. Moreover, only agricultural products from the border provinces could be exported to the border markets on the Chinese side, and imported Chinese goods were not to be sold to merchants outside the border area.Footnote ⁷⁴ Due to aggressive joint state efforts to interfere with and profit from the spontaneous cross-border networks, the border markets shrank greatly after the summer of 1957, with fewer people applying for trade licences and more crossing the border illegally through the less-patrolled trails. Chinese border authorities at Aikou, an officially opened border market, noted that whereas they used to welcome approximately 500 traders from Vietnam per day, there were almost no foreign visitors in August 1957.Footnote ⁷⁵

Given the pivotal role of Huaqiao-Hoa kiều traders in the commercial networks between southern China and Southeast Asia, and their strong regional connections over the land, across the maritime border, and within Vietnam, their experience under the aggressive state suppression of private commerce in the China-Vietnam border area merits special attention.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even during the period of close socialist comradeship between Beijing and Hanoi, the Huaqiao merchants still enjoyed favourable treatment at the Chinese border markets because of their ethnic connections with southern China and their language skills. In June 1955, Vietnamese state representatives complained to Chinese officials about the different treatment of the Vietnamese and Huaqiao merchants at the Chinese border markets: the Chinese state-run companies refused to purchase herbs brought by the Vietnamese because of their low quality, while accepting the same batch of products sold by Huaqiao traders the next day. ‘It has become a widespread experience among the Vietnamese,’ added the Vietnamese officials, ‘that it is better to ask the Huaqiao to sell products on behalf of the Vietnamese.’ An inspection group dispatched by the Guangxi provincial government later admitted that many Vietnamese peddlers believed that they were discriminated against at the Chinese border markets; therefore, they chose to hide their nationality and pretend to be Huaqiao when dealing with the Chinese companies. The different treatment of Huaqiao and Vietnamese traders at the border markets had serious political consequences, which, as noted by the inspection group, ‘was a far cry from the principle of fostering the solidarity between the two peoples at the border—an internationalist spirit that drove us to open the small-scale border trade at the very beginning’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Realizing that the Sino-Vietnamese lips and teeth relationship promoted by the political centres did not translate into a persuasive sense of unity with the Vietnamese among the grassroots Chinese cadres, the Guangxi provincial government had to emphasize the strategic significance of small-scale border trade. The provincial customs authorities required Chinese officials at the border to ‘get rid of the remnants of great-nation chauvinism or narrow nationalism, and uplift internationalism’. Favouring Huaqiao while discriminating against the Vietnamese people, they noted, would result in a serious political loss.Footnote ⁷⁸ The experience of Huaqiao at the border markets suggests a striking continuity in the cross-border economic exchanges, in which personal and ethnic connections gave rise to favouritism, despite an engineered friendship between the two political centres that required impartiality.

The marginalization of small-scale border trade after the First Indochina War was the result of both the domestic campaigns of socialist transformation in China and Vietnam, which sought to construct a centrally planned command economy, and the cooperation between the two communist regimes at the border markets which aimed at controlling economic exchanges. In his comparison of pre-modern and colonial states, James Scott argues that the decisive advantage of the modern state apparatus was to be found as much in paperwork as in arms. Effective tax extraction is the end product of cadastral surveys, settlement reports, censuses, identity cards, and ‘a growing body of regulations and procedures’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The communist state, which had long mobilized from the bottom-up through disciplined officials, was exceptionally efficient in capturing and recording the status of each inhabitant, each piece of land, and each activity relevant to the state's interest.Footnote ⁸⁰ The logic behind the two communist countries’ regulation of border trade was first to make it visible to and taxable by the state by stipulating the locations of economic exchanges. They then followed a policy of excluding private merchants and establishing a monopoly of state-run companies at border markets in the hope that the inhabitants would eventually turn their back on the border and be integrated into a nationalized economy supervised by the political centres. However, ordinary people could turn their backs on the state apparatus by exploring alternative spaces for cross-border exchanges. This underlined the dilemma surrounding the consolidation of an all-encompassing state without alienating the people encountered by the communist states when they extended their reach into the borderlands.

Turning border society inwards: severing cross-boundary social ties

The hunt for potentially subversive individuals by the border police and the war on private cross-border commerce by the state-run companies were not sufficient to create a communist border. The two communist states collaborated in making the border a point of contrast by turning the respective frontier societies inwards. This joint state-building and border-making process required government intervention in people's daily lives and greater control over local economies, beyond restructuring commerce. For example, by reducing cross-border farming, the socialist states could more efficiently extract tax revenues and integrate the border societies into the centrally planned economy. The state would also reach into more intimate aspects of the interactions between border people, such as marriage.

If the two communist countries’ policies to nationalize cross-border trade represented a determination to make border crossings points of difference, their decision to eliminate cross-border farming highlighted the more ambitious goal of enforcing the borderline. The issue of cross-border farming between Beijing and Hanoi initially emerged as a tax problem. After the end of the First Indochina War, the Vietnamese local government asked Chinese farmers who owned or harvested from land in Vietnam to pay ‘overdue agricultural taxes’ for the period 1951 to 1954.Footnote ⁸¹ Surveys of cross-border croplands quickly revealed to the two governments the existence of contested sovereignty and disputed territory along the border. This is a vivid example of how the extraction of surplus from a marginal society by the modernizing state led to territorial claims that could overlap with those made by other countries engaged in similar state-building projects.

Continuous wars and conflicts in the China-Vietnam border region from the late 1940s had undermined the strength of central states in the area and had given the local population significant leeway against political authorities. Before 1948, people from Guangxi and then west Guangdong who had land in Vietnam paid agricultural tax in the form of rice to the French Annam state. As the population in southern China increased, landlords acquired land in Vietnam by purchase, while agriculturalists did so through the practice of swidden.Footnote ⁸² After the outbreak of the First Indochina War, some of them returned to Guangxi while keeping their land in Vietnam.Footnote ⁸³ Renting or the transfer of land as dowry or betrothal gifts also resulted in cross-border farming.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1949 and 1950, neither the colonial state nor the Viet Minh were able to levy tax from its northern border, and the Vietnamese communist regime only started to collect tax in the area after 1951.Footnote ⁸⁵ Most of the landowners from China, however, were able to escape paying Vietnamese agricultural taxes during the war.

The different pace of state-building in China and Vietnam also allowed perceptive borderland residents to exploit the disparity of state strength on the two sides. They defended themselves before local Chinese officials by asserting that ‘they had attempted to carry rice to Vietnam as tax payment but were either blocked at the customs for a lack of legal documents to export crops or were declined by the Vietnamese officials due to uncertainty of tax rates’. While a few border residents admitted that they took a gamble by assuming that the Vietnamese government was weak, others emphasized that the Vietnamese government usually collected tax in February and March when they had almost consumed all the rice they harvested in the previous year.Footnote ⁸⁶ With the Sino-Vietnamese socialist partnership in mind, local officials labelled these state-evasion strategies as ‘great-nation chauvinism’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the end, the Guangxi provincial government estimated that Chinese residents from 94 border towns owed the Vietnamese government approximately 750,000 to 1,000,000 kilograms of rice for the period 1951 to 1954. Meanwhile, most border people from northern Vietnam who farmed in China paid agricultural tax to the Chinese government.Footnote ⁸⁸

After the end of the First Indochina War, the tax implications of the consolidation of the Vietnamese communist state were soon felt at the Sino-Vietnamese border. As instructed by Hanoi, Vietnamese provincial administrations started to communicate with Chinese border counties about overdue tax in late 1954. They required that border people from China who had land in Vietnam pay agricultural taxes from 1951 to 1953 based on Vietnamese tax laws. As for the taxes from 1954 onwards, they proposed adding up the individual harvests in China and Vietnam, calculating the per capita output of rice in the household, and then levying tax according to the Chinese tax rate. People from Vietnam who had land in China would pay agricultural tax in the same way.Footnote ⁸⁹

Although the Vietnamese government's request was an overt response to the need to increase revenue in the face of post-war food shortages, it was also linked to other, more hidden issues. For example, the Vietnamese clearly desired to present an image of a functioning, legitimate socialist Vietnamese state to its northern neighbour. Meanwhile, while available Vietnamese sources cannot confirm whether the Vietnamese government intentionally used agricultural tax to signal its territorial claims over disputed areas along the border, this issue certainly made the Chinese government more aware of the problem of contested sovereignty. The Office of Foreign Affairs of Guangxi, for instance, noted that, according to a civilian map, some of the land claimed by the Vietnamese government fell under the administration of China's Fangcheng County, while belonging to Vietnam on a military map. It insisted that ‘this issue [was] pertinent to national territorial sovereignty thus should be reported to the [CCP] Central Committee’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Chinese local government took various international and domestic factors into consideration when seeking a resolution with the Vietnamese. As Hanoi's most important ally, China had to respect and support Vietnam's rights to extract resources from Vietnamese territory. Therefore, Fangcheng County ignored a grassroots organization's suggestion that the Vietnamese should reduce taxes for impecunious peasants and ethnic minorities.Footnote ⁹¹ Meanwhile, a nationalist desire to define and defend sovereignty shaped Sino-Vietnamese relations even during the heyday of their communist brotherhood. None of the provincial institutions involved in the discussion agreed with the Vietnamese proposal to calculate total rice output from both sides of the borderline as the basis for tax extraction in the future. Instead, provincial financial and foreign affairs offices came up with a programme aimed at both keeping China's agricultural statistics confidential and reducing cross-border land ownership. They proposed that each government would levy taxes from lower-income people according to the local tax rate and the average output of the town where the land was located. Since the majority of people engaged in cross-border farming were classified as ‘poor peasants’ whose harvest fell below the average, this tax scheme aimed at discouraging them from farming across the international boundary. As to landlords, the government would treat each foreign holder of land in its territory as one household and impose progressive taxation, which would significantly increase their tax burden.Footnote ⁹² The Chinese local government was also concerned that the Vietnamese request that all overdue taxes be paid in full at one time would lead to social instability. Guangxi provincial officials thus proposed to Beijing that the Chinese government pay the taxes due from 1951 to 1954 in full to Vietnam on behalf of lower-income people. It further suggested that Beijing make payments for those categorized as rich peasants, landlords, and businessmen, but that the amounts paid be deducted from their salaries.Footnote ⁹³ This proposal shows that local agents of the state were protective of the border community, where the population identified as ‘ethnic minorities’ often overlapped with the economically disadvantaged.

The tax lever aimed at reducing the size of cross-border land ownership soon took effect. In late 1955, Jingxi County reported to the Guangxi provincial government that some border people sought to give up cross-border farming by swapping land. In December, the provincial administration not only gave the green light to land swaps on ‘a voluntary and mutually beneficial basis’ but also decided to simplify the legal process in order to encourage future exchanges.Footnote ⁹⁴ In January 1956, the International Department of the Central Committee of the CCP issued general guidelines that stated, ‘to facilitate border management and reduce disputes between border residents, [the local Chinese officials] should actively create favourable conditions to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate cross-border cultivated land’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Following these instructions, local officials put forward plans to reduce cross-border farming and forestry by combining economic compensation and political campaigns. Fangcheng County, for instance, decided to offer monetary compensation equal to the total agricultural output of one to three years to people who had to give up their harvest in Vietnam. Moreover, party cadres sought to indoctrinate a national awareness among the borderlanders through the settlement of cross-border farming. People affected by the policy were required to ‘lift the internationalist spirit, respect the territorial integrity of the DRV, and understand that it was entirely reasonable to return crop fields and forests to the Vietnamese’. Moreover, party cadres educated the border population ‘to make use of the abundant sources of our home country to develop socialism and improve living standard instead of relying on foreign countries’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Because the two communist states were assertive in claiming resources from their territory and turning the border society inwards, the traditional strategy of borderlanders to stay autonomous, by running away or moving between and around states, for example,Footnote ⁹⁷ became a less and less promising one. Stateless space disappeared not only on the map but also in terms of administrative oversight. The effects of the policy to discourage cross-border farming, however, should not be overestimated. As shown in the next section of this article, it was not until a comprehensive land survey along the border was undertaken in 1957 that the central governments even realized the sheer number of households involved in cross-border farming and forestry.

Besides economic connections, cross-border marriage and family ties arising from it formed a solid cultural foundation for the borderlands society that even the aggressive political projects of boundary-making could not shake. State intervention and regulation of cross-border marriage is a vivid example of the ramifications of state-building within a marginal society, which historically had been spaces of juridical exception.

Marriage became a practice of concern to the state in China in the early twentieth century. Extended families, arranged marriages, and polygamy were among the traditional social institutions that came under attack for thwarting China's aspiration to transform itself into a modern nation. The Civil Code of the Republic of China marked a significant break from the role of the state in regulating past marital practices. It justified the state's intervention into people's intimate relations in the name of fostering citizens’ loyalty to the modern nation. Nevertheless, the reach of the state was too limited to shake gender inequity and the patriarchal structure, especially in the rural areas.Footnote ⁹⁸ While the New Marriage Law of 1950 was among the first legislation promulgated by the revolutionary regime, it was not until the mid-1950s that the provisions of the law, such as the establishment of civil registries, were widely publicized and strictly enforced.Footnote ⁹⁹

It was against this background of nationwide marriage reform in China that potential conflicts in marriage laws became a concern for the local Chinese administrations at the border, long before the Marriage and Family Law of the DRV was established in 1959. In June 1954, Beijing issued a general guideline as to how local administrations should deal with marriage between Chinese and Vietnamese citizens in the border area. Cross-border marriage requests ‘should be permitted as long as it is not against the Marriage Law of our country or laws of the Vietnamese state’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Based on this central decree, the Guangxi provincial government established an administrative procedure for cross-border marriage and divorce in June 1955.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In practice, however, adherence to the revolutionary concept of class struggle affected the communist state's attitude towards individual cases of cross-border marriage. Lin Deqing, for instance, was a landlord's daughter in Longjin County who had fled to Vietnam during the land reform launched by the Chinese communists in the ‘newly liberated area’ in 1950. She married a Vietnamese in 1952, yet was arrested by the local Chinese ‘land reform work group’ and taken into custody in her hometown. In October 1955, Lin's husband applied for her release through the Vietnamese police, which seemed less concerned with Lin's class background. The authorities of Longjin County believed that Lin should be allowed to migrate to Vietnam as long as she ‘did not conspire with any spy agents or bandits’. The Foreign Affairs Office of Guangxi, however, overruled the moderate position of the border county and banned her emigration, citing her background as a diehard landlord who ‘felt discontent with the government and the people’.Footnote ¹⁰² The revolutionary regime, in this case, was determined to divide a cross-border household when the marriage became a source of national insecurity. Thus class background determined the permeability of the boundary line for ordinary residents.

What concerned local officials most was not whether to endorse individual cross-border marriage requests but how to resolve cross-border conjugal disputes, which required not only considerable time but also local knowledge beyond their understanding. The provincial government, for instance, prescribed that if a Chinese citizen filed a request to divorce a Vietnamese who did not live in China, the Chinese local administration should consult the opinions of the Vietnamese individual and the Vietnamese government through its consulate in Nanning, the provincial capital of Guangxi.Footnote ¹⁰³ This instruction was deemed ‘too generalistic’ and ‘difficult to implement’ for the lower-level authority. Local state agents were often trapped in a difficult choice between interference and stepping back when asked to resolve family disputes, especially those involving settlements of property and children.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A typical example of cross-border marriage dispute was bigamy involving Vietnamese women and Chinese men. It was not uncommon in the rural areas for a married woman to escape from her household, either due to spousal violence or economic difficulty, and remarry. When the dispute happened between families on the two sides of the border, however, in the eyes of the local administration, a complex international problem arose. Resolving cross-border marital conflicts became burdensome to the officials because the people involved often resorted to the state authorities of their home country when they believed this would help them bargain for a better deal. In one such case, Pan Shimao, a peasant living at the Guangxi border, married a Vietnamese woman introduced by a Vietnamese matchmaker. It soon turned out that his ‘wife’ already had a husband in Vietnam, and she left Pan for her Vietnamese hometown after the wedding. Pan rushed to Vietnam without any legal travel documents and asked the matchmaker to return the commission and the bride price he had paid. Rejected outright and bluntly, he angrily took away the matchmaker's buffalo and wrangled with his wife's family. After the Vietnamese border authorities communicated with the Chinese side, the county government of Pan's residence sharply criticized him for being ‘chauvinist’ and ‘ignoring border regulations’, even if it was the Vietnamese woman's fault for not divorcing first before marrying Pan. In the end, the Chinese and Vietnamese local administrators managed to persuade Pan Shimao to return the buffalo and the bride to return the betrothal gift she had received from Pan.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Given the deep-rooted ethnic connections across the border and the considerable number of unresolved marriage disputes, the provincial court of Guangxi issued a guide to the local border authorities endorsing settlements through ‘persuasion’ or ‘conciliation’ within the community. This position was in stark contrast to the provincial government's initial policy which stipulated settlement through diplomatic channels. As early as the Yen'an period in the early 1940s, the Chinese communist cadres had used ‘persuasion’ or ‘conciliation’ to resolve family differences. The communists, after all, considered the law to be more valuable than other techniques of social reform, such as political education, mediation, and persuasion.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Besides ideological preferences, the provincial decision to avoid a diplomatic or legislative settlement of cross-border marital disputes was based on practical concerns. The provincial court of Guangxi admitted that:

The on-the-ground reality at the border rolled back the provincial government's decision, which highlights the problem with treating all cross-border connections as international issues. While the sovereign ambition of a modern nation gave the state the justification to interfere with the most intimate aspects of people's lives in the borderlands, it imposed significant administrative burdens on the local agents. Largely due to the non-interventionist attitude of the local administration, problems inherent in transnational marriage, such as nationality, legal residence, and conflicts over marriage laws, remained shelved until a meeting between the border provinces in November 1956.

Tensions between borderline administration and borderland realities: the meeting between border provinces in 1956 and its aftermath

The five-province border conference between representatives from China's Guangxi and Guangdong, and Vietnam's Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn, and Hải Ninh, hosted from 6–9 November 1956 in Nanning, highlighted that state-building and border-making at the China-Vietnam borderlands was an internationally coordinated project. The creation of all-encompassing states by two communist regimes necessitated joint efforts by Beijing and Hanoi to squeeze a soft, poorly defended border space into a hard one with a more clearly defined borderline, the crossing of which came with higher political risks and economic costs. The fact that the meeting was between provinces from the eastern part of the China-Vietnam border might indicate that the two countries were more eager to work out a solution for border issues in the lowlands, where the states enjoyed stronger institutional strength than in the highlands. The Chinese and Vietnamese representatives admitted that, for the immediate future, they needed to respect the centuries-long customs and cross-border connections for the sake of maintaining social stability and promoting production. Meanwhile, they also set a long-term objective of turning the borderland population away from the borderline.

Except for the rather sensitive issue of border demarcation, the provincial government was the appropriate level of political authority to negotiate a settlement for specific aspects of monitoring and reducing the mobility of people and goods across the border, such as land and forest ownership, buffalo trade, debts between border residents, nationality, marriages, and management of border defence zones. A division of responsibility between the central and provincial governments was set out in the meeting's agenda. The two sides shelved the issue of resolving potential border disputes but reached a consensus that ‘some of the boundary markers [had] been moved, which could incur disputes if the two parties [did] not resolve the problem’. Endorsed by the CCP's Party Central and the VWP, the border provinces would scrutinize the issue, discuss a settlement, and report to party leaders.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Beijing and Hanoi, meanwhile, would not be bogged down with a great number of decisions on issues that required local knowledge and meticulous attention.

The first action taken by the representatives at the border province meeting was to normalize a series of established practices to reduce the border residents’ motives to cross the borderline and to undermine deep-rooted transnational social networks. The two states’ attitudes to cross-border farming and forestry best signalled their determination to intrude into everyday life in the borderlands. ‘To strengthen border management and avoid border disputes,’ they planned, ‘the two sides [would] actively, firmly, and gradually decrease and withdraw altogether from land farmed by residents across the border.’ Besides encouraging voluntary land-swaps between holders of land and forests, the border provinces scheduled a thorough land investigation on each side, followed by a formal exchange of land and forests starting in March or April 1957. Whereas cross-border farming on existing crop fields was temporarily permitted for peasants ‘facing real economic difficulties’, swiddening of or transactions involving land across the border were prohibited.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

For cross-border ties less likely to cause contested territorial claims, the border provinces decided to respect ‘historical customs’. They agreed, for instance, not to restrict fishing or the passing of boats from either country on the boundary river.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As for cross-border debts, the border provinces permitted the county authorities to mediate disputes based on the laws of the creditor's home country. They also made arrangements for the repayment of government bonds and debts borrowed by guerrillas and local troops from people on the other side of the border during the Chinese Civil War and the First Indochina War.Footnote ¹¹¹

Policies regarding cross-border marriage and nationalities reflected the two communist countries’ unease with the transnational fraternity fostered by ethnic bonds. In 1955, the PRC, which did not recognize dual citizenship, agreed in talks with the DRV that ‘all subjects of Chinese origin living in the DRV should be encouraged to assimilate on a voluntary and gradual basis into Vietnamese society’.Footnote ¹¹² Beijing's attitude to the Việt Kiều (overseas Vietnamese) in China, however, remained unclear. At the 1956 border province meeting, Chinese representatives conveyed the opinions of the CCP leadership to the Vietnamese counterparts: the Kinh people who migrated to China after the PRC was founded were considered Việt Kiều. Those who moved to China before October 1949 and then made a career or had a legitimate occupation and settled down in China would also be ‘persuaded to keep their Vietnamese citizenship’. Only those who insisted on obtaining Chinese nationality and Vietnamese women who married Chinese men might be allowed to change their citizenship.Footnote ¹¹³ Beijing's policy of non-assimilation perhaps indicates its concerns over the ethnic mosaic at the margins of its territory and the possibility of Vietnamese demanding favourable treatment after becoming an ethnic minority with a significant population.

For cross-border marriages, the two countries agreed to adopt a ‘not banning but not encouraging’ policy as long as the marriage was not regarded as illegal in the country where it was registered.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More-flexible systems, however, were employed in the highlands. The two sides admitted that it was difficult to determine the citizenship of those considered ‘ethnic minorities’ who constantly moved back and forth across the borderline; therefore, these people could choose their nationality based on their residence at the time of registration. Moreover, local state representatives were instructed to ‘respect the long-established social, cultural, and family connections between the Mèo, Mán, and Lô Lô people’ dispersed along the border and to refrain from interfering in some of their marriage traditions, such as dowry.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Finally, the border provinces drafted a legal procedure for border crossing by border dwellers who lived within a 20-kilometre radius of the border. Considering the local population's need to travel across the boundary for production, subsistence, and schooling, the two countries decided to open more unpatrolled trails managed by cadres of the border towns instead of border garrisons. Border dwellers who sought to cross the border for other ‘legitimate reasons’, such as paying homage to tombs, reuniting with relatives, or seeing a doctor, could apply for a temporary travel document valid for three to six months. In principle, it was preferred they should use the officially opened border crossings, although exceptions could be granted to people residing in remote towns.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In 1957, based on the agreement, the police authorities of Guangxi decided to impose stricter limitations on the migration of border residents, requiring that any requests to move into or out of the country should be inspected by county-level public security institutions and endorsed by the Vietnamese side. ‘Key members of reactionary secret societies, bandits, bullies, spies, former Nationalists still committed to counterrevolutionary positions, and criminals’, however, ‘should not be permitted to migrate out or in’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Through this selective blocking of cross-border flows of people and goods, the two regimes aimed to translate their nationwide revolutionary victories into increased authority at the border. It was, nonetheless, in the interests of the two governments to maintain the ‘permeability of borders’,Footnote ¹¹⁸ given that neither of them was able to supply all the necessary resources to secure the basic livelihood of the borderlanders.

Despite a carefully planned land-swapping project, the two countries encountered enormous difficulty in eliminating cross-border agriculture with any promptness. During the scheduled land survey conducted by Guangxi and Guangdong in the frontier counties, provincial officials finally realized the sheer scale of cross-border farming. According to a Guangxi report to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, ‘more than 800 households in the province, including a considerable number of Zhuang, Yao, Miao (Mèo), Lo Lo (Lô Lô), and Kinh ethnic minorities, farmed on the other side of the borderline’. More importantly, except in a few commercially oriented towns, people involved in cross-border agriculture depended on a good harvest in Vietnam for their very existence.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In late 1956, Hanoi retreated from its original position of demanding payment of overdue tax from cross-border farming largely due to the bureaucratic costs of working out the exact amount of the tax. The two sides agreed to levy agricultural taxes on cross-border farming from 1957 based on the law of the country where the land was located, while exempting amounts due from before 1956.Footnote ¹²⁰ In March 1957, Beijing further reversed its policy of discouraging cross-border agriculture by instructing the Guangdong provincial government that the status quo of all cross-border crop fields, except those that had already been swapped or returned, should be maintained. Local officials no longer needed to persuade people to give up cross-border farming. Moreover, the Chinese State Council ordered the border provinces to be more flexible about activities such as grazing cattle and obtaining firewood across the border so long as doing so did not jeopardize Vietnam's interests. Meanwhile, the border counties were granted more authority to solve cross-border issues through consultation with local Vietnamese officials.Footnote ¹²¹

The changing attitude of Beijing and Hanoi towards cross-border agriculture and its tax implications symbolized the gap between policy making and implementation at the political periphery. While the local administrations were more capable of discovering and recording the cross-border movements of people and goods than before, whether considered legal or illegal, they were not always committed to containing these activities. The native populations still enjoyed considerable leeway against the state by, for example, crossing the border spontaneously for the sake of their livelihoods. After Hanoi placed more restrictions on small-scale border trade in July 1957, the Chinese border police at Friendship Pass detected approximately 100 Vietnamese citizens who entered China each day through small mountain trails without travel documents and traded with the Chinese without any trade permits, whereas the number had only been around ten before August.Footnote ¹²² With the increasing radicalization of Chinese politics following the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, the reported cases of Chinese sneaking into Vietnam within the patrolling area of the Friendship Pass Border Authority more than doubled, from 132 in 1957 to 291 in the following year.Footnote ¹²³ Most people caught for illegally crossing the border were required to attend an education session on the government policy and were then released, which was hardly enough to deter further unlawful border crossing.

In short, the communist states carefully designed an internationally coordinated project to extend their reach into the borderlands, yet were pushed back by the realities on the ground. This illustrates the gap between the demanding tasks assumed by the border administrations and their limited strength. Diplomatic historians and political scientists, for example, argue that during the Cold War, China often attempted to use the settlement of border issues with its neighbours (especially by reaching a compromise with them) to bargain for broader foreign policy objectives or to address internal threats to regime security.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the border region, it turned out that the state had to pursue multiple objectives, including, but not limited to, foreign policy goals. It not only produced authoritarian institutions but also had to offer promises of prosperity to the people.

Guidelines for border inspection drafted by the Guangxi Military Region Command in October 1956 best highlight the heavy burden laid on local cadres. It stipulated that the border garrison and police should

This requirement revealed the fundamental obstacle encountered by grassroots state institutions at the border. As part of the street-level bureaucracy dispatched to a remote, unfamiliar society which had historically resisted intrusion by the central state, border authorities nevertheless were expected to accomplish a five-fold, internally contradictory mission.