Departing from conventional studies of border hostility in inter-Asian relations, Yin Qingfei explores how two revolutionary states – China and Vietnam – each pursued policies that echoed the other and collaborated in extending their authority to the borderlands from 1949 to 1975.
Making use of central and local archival sources in both Chinese and Vietnamese, she reveals how the people living on the border responded to such unprecedentedly aggressive state building and especially how they appropriated the language of socialist brotherhood to negotiate with authorities. During the continuous Indochina wars, state expansion thus did not unfold on these postcolonial borderlands in a coherent or linear manner. Weaving together international, national, and transnational-local histories, the speaker presents a new approach to the highly volatile Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Cold War, centering on the two modernising revolutionary powers' competitive and collaborative state building on the borderlands and local responses to it.
Meet our speaker and chair:
Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, she is currently working on a project on the history of China's ocean shipping during the Cold War. Qingfei is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degrees and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at the Virginia Military Institute.
John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
More about this event:
The Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre (@LSESEAC) is a multidisciplinary Research Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Building on the School’s deep academic and historical connections with Southeast Asia, SEAC seeks to foster world-leading academic research focused on the region’s cultural, economic, political, religious, and social landscapes, drawing on the LSE’s signature strengths in the social sciences, history, and law.
The Department of International History is one of the world’s leading centres for historical study and research. History at the LSE is consistently ranked amongst the top ten in the QS World University subject league tables, and in the top three in the UK and Europe. Founded in 1954, the department’s acknowledged and long-established research and teaching strengths are reflected in the breadth and range of its coverage from the early modern to the contemporary era.
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