This paper uses local archival sources from Yingkou county to examine how the Chinese Communist Party repurposed the mobilization campaign for the Korean War to construct a socialist Chinese identity for the postcolonial population. A former colonial railway town close to the Korean border, the county remained largely recalcitrant during the CCP’s early political purges. Collaborators who served under the Japanese continued to wield influence in the countryside; memories of colonial prosperity remained alive and well among the urbanites. The Korean War emerged as a golden opportunity for the Party to create a new world imagination for its wayward subjects. Festive anti-Japanese voting rituals mimicked the local culture of elections to inspire new national loyalty; “tell colonial bitterness” rallies reshaped popular memories of the Japanese past. Yet specters of colonialism lived on in another form. As wartime mobilization imposed increasingly unbearable pressure on the local economy, legal order started to crumble. Local people resorted to the familiar strategies of everyday politics, perfected in the years of colonial rule, to engage and at the same time evade the extractive state. The socialist world-making project remained incomplete, its pretense of national uniformity shattered in the everyday social world. The checkered life of the Korean War in the local space of Liaodong should help us rethink the campaign narratives of national mobilization and the post-1945 reintegration of Manchuria into the Chinese national geobody.
