Ethnic tensions in the People’s Republic of China frequently capture global attention. This panel attempts to trace how ethnopolitics has developed and transformed across both the Maoist and post-Mao eras in China’s various non-Han regions by focusing on the mutual influence between the Chinese party-state’s ruling techniques and the ethnic identification, categorization, and racialization among the people—both the non-Han peoples and Han Chinese residing in non-Han areas. Through four papers examining Yanbian, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, this panel seeks to contribute an interdisciplinary and cross‑temporal comparative perspective to this topic.

This panel intervenes in three overlapping literatures on the People’s Republic of China: scholarship on frontier governance and nation-building that treats ethnopolitics as a peripheral “minority question” (viz. Liu 2004; Weiner 2020); work on ethnicity and classification that foregrounds state categories but often cannot connect them to territorial design and coercive repertoires (viz. Gladney 1991; Mullaney 2010); and comparative histories of empire-to-nation transitions that struggle to explain why autonomy repeatedly functions as a tool of incorporation rather than self-rule (Yan Sun 2020; Burbank & Cooper 2010). Drawing on new local archives and underused internal sources, the papers show how ruling techniques and popular identification were co-produced through contests over territory, classification, and political economy, from high socialism to the reform era.

The first two papers focus on the Maoist era and examine the ethnopolitical issues involving ethnic Koreans and Mongols, respectively, both groups having profoundly participated in the Chinese communist revolution and impacted the party-state’s general ethnopolitical approach. Chen scrutinizes the controversies over the territorial sovereignty of China’s ethnic Korean borderland, in the formative years of the People’s Republic and demonstrates how China’s Korean population, with their transnational identification that did not fully align with the official agendas of either China or North Korea, exerted their own agency in negotiating their political and economic rights of their historical settlement in Manchuria. Wang examines the evolution and solidification of the boundary of Inner Mongolia in the high socialist period and reveals how the mutual reinforcement between the party-state’s gerrymandering strategy and the local Mongol leadership’s irredentist pursuit—or the lack thereof—determined both the administrative affiliation of territories and the state-sanctioned ethnic categorization of their residents.

The other two papers focus on the post-Mao decades and scrutinize how China’s post-socialist transformation impacted Xinjiang and Tibet, two areas that repeatedly saw major ethnic unrests. Liu demonstrates how the Chinese party-state’s uneven deployment of coercion and co-optation in ideological, economic, and social aspects in the early post-Mao era not only facilitated the Islam-centered, rather than Turkic-centered, frame of Uyghur identification, but also shaped the demographics and patterns of Uyghur mobilization and resistance. Lin analyzes the relationship between China’s capitalist transition and the racialization process of the minoritized peoples in Tibet and Xinjiang from 1980s to the recent years, and demonstrates how capitalist development served to transform the pre-existing ethno-racialized relations into a racialized differentiation that differently values labor across working classes, thereby underpinning the capitalist accumulation of settler colonialism.