Assisting Our Neighbors: The Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution, and Local Violence in Yunnan, 1964–74

This article explores the entangled histories of China’s engagement in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1974 with a border-oriented perspective. Through the collision of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in Yunnan, this article suggests that Maoist ideals of world revolution intensified local violence and peripheralized Yunnan both economically and politically. The story of the Yunnan frontier represented a localized manifestation of Cold War dynamics, where global geopolitical tensions had imposed affective, physical, and structural violence on the lives of ordinary people in Yunnan. Both the Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War transformed China’s southwestern border into a restless status dominated by a war preparation agenda. While a total war with the United States never came to life, China’s southwestern border was deeply shaped by state-imposed militarization and overextension to provide foreign aid for North Vietnam. Shifting the focus from high politics to everyday experience, this article sheds light on how ordinary people in Yunnan bore the price of the Maoist world revolution, suffering from direct and structural violence caused by global power rivalry that made borderlands more turbulent and vulnerable.