The frontier on the front lines: the Chinese Communist discourse on China’s southwest and its peoples during the Korean War, 1950–1953

This article argues that the Korean War (1950–1953) was a discursive event through which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to buttress its vision of Chinese nationhood and territoriality within the newly-founded People’s Republic of China. It examines the CCP’s political discourse on China’s ethnoculturally-diverse southwestern borderlands and so-called ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu) against the Korean War background. Through an analysis of People’s Daily (Renmin ribao) articles published between 1950 and 1953 that feature China’s southwestern frontier, I identify three prevalent discursive designs that connected the remote southwest to the Korean War front and endorsed a vision of a multi-nationality territorialized nation-state: (1) the military participation of minority nationalities, which exemplified a cross-nationality Chinese war effort; (2) representations of a resource-rich southwestern frontier, manifesting a geostrategic gaze on a territorialized periphery; and (3) the fight against ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ which integrated minority nationalities into narratives of national humiliation and anti-imperialist struggle.