The Scarred Landscape: Coming to Terms with Landmines After the Sino-Vietnamese Border Conflict

Examining the extensive use of landmines along the Yunnan borders by China and Vietnam during their border conflict from 1979 to 1993, this paper analyzes the enduring impact of landmines on postwar border communities. It suggests that landmines could be conceptualized as an iconographic infrastructure that transitions from a violent proxy of sovereign power, to an obstruction of life, and eventually to a biopolitical tool redefining the relationship between human body and postwar environment. Instead of perceiving border residents as passive recipients of the violence indulged by military waste, this article treats their everyday living tactics navigating through the minefields as an active resistance to state power. The enduring presence of landmines in Yunnan illuminates that the Sino-Vietnamese border conflict engenders a structure that continues to diffuse violence, rather than merely a short disturbance in borderlands.

Drawing on in-depth archival research and ethnographic work in Yunnan, this article proposes violence as an indispensable analytical framework to understand China’s reform era, a time commonly labeled with peace, prosperity, and progression. By interrogating the life cycle of military waste, it challenges conventional periodizations that dichotomize war and peace in postcolonial borderlands. Landmines are not only relics of past conflicts but active agents that extend the temporal boundaries of war into periods ostensibly defined by peace. War dissidents into life by diffusing into thousands of different channels, creating a perpetual state of violence. Showing that the painful wound left by the collapse of socialist solidarity during the Cold War continues to shape the lived realities of border communities, this article questions whether the “post” in the term “post–Cold War” has ever fully come true. This article contributes to broader historiographical debates on war, sovereignty, and the materiality of violence in postcolonial borderlands.