In 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded, millions of people became citizens of a new communist state overnight. This panel interrogates what it meant for people either living within the borders of the PRC or in proximate borderlands to contest, interrogate, reject, or participate in new projects of state and nation building with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In turn, the panel investigates the changing meanings and conceptualizations of “Chinese-ness” while negotiating citizenship and ethnicity under evolving political formations and emerging cultural conditions. Together, we complicate the facile narrative of early state-building in the PRC to show that minority actors were active arbitrators in what it meant to be (or not be) Chinese during this politically tumultuous time.

Through the lens of ethnic Koreans residing in Manchuria, Emily Maston asks about their experiences fighting with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Chinese Civil War and how they reconciled their loyalties to the CCP with their ethnic Korean identity in the years immediately following the establishment of the PRC. Joanna Lee-Brown places Chinese Muslim intellectual Ma Jian’s translations and annotations of the Qur’an in the early 1950s into dialogue with Islamic modernists in the Middle East. Doing so, Lee-Brown shows how Ma Jian’s exegetical and translational translations of the Qur’an work not only contributed to the theorization of Islam as a revolutionary religion befitting a socialist China but also asserted the place of Chinese Islam in global Islamic modernism.

Following this, Muyun Zhou examines the emergence of Hanhwa (韓華) as a cultural identity adopted by second-generation ethnic Chinese in South Korea during the early Cold War. Zhou argues that deploying the term “Hanhwa” constituted a tactical redefinition of Han-Chineseness itself, becoming a floating ethnic identity that operated outside the borders of the PRC which could endure across the instability and fragmentation of Chinese citizenship in the early Cold War. Finally, Yanshuo Zhang provides new insights into the visual and epistemological construction of ethnic frontiers in the Himalayan regions bordering the Sino-Tibetan territories in the 1930s and 1940s. Zhang argues that photographic reportage produced a deeply interwoven social space where ethnicity, nationhood, gender, visual culture and anthropology came into intimate contact to redefine the controversial ethnic frontier regions of a rapidly transforming multicultural Chinese nation.

Rooted in historical methodology, but also adopting the interdisciplinary methods of area studies, the panel adopts a distinctly transregional approach to think broadly about what it meant to navigate new ideas of citizenship and belonging in the early Cold War. Ethnic minorities and overseas Chinese whose relationship to the new state remained precarious and contested used new representations, expressions, and interactions in everyday life to offer challenges to the monolithic, state-driven narratives of “Chineseness.” Overall, the panel makes important interventions into the discursive history of ethnic minorities and diasporic actors in the early years of the PRC to show how these processes were not linear, but historically contingent and fraught with long-lasting ethnopolitical tensions that often surface in borderland spaces.