In my review for the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Review of Books, titled Cold War Transformations – State Building in China and Vietnam’s Borderlands, I examine Qingfei Yin’s State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino‑Vietnamese Border, a work that reorients our understanding of how revolutionary states forged—and contested—their authority at the margins.
Yin’s archival excavation illuminates the intricate choreography of collaboration and competition that defined the Sino‑Vietnamese frontier. Far from peripheral, this borderland emerges as a crucible in which solidarity and rivalry unfolded simultaneously. Everyday practices of governance—administrative consolidation, infrastructural expansion, ideological inculcation—were inseparable from grand strategic imperatives. The frontier thus becomes a dynamic theatre where sovereignty was not merely asserted but continuously negotiated and reconstituted.
The review underscores how Yin unsettles conventional historiography by demonstrating that borderlands were never passive margins. Instead, they were active sites of state formation, where comradeship could engender competition and where the lived realities of local communities refracted the broader tensions of the Cold War. By bridging Cold War history, Asian studies, and theories of state‑building, the book offers a compelling tableau of how revolutionary regimes shaped—and were shaped by—their contested peripheries.
Ultimately, the Sino‑Vietnamese border stands as emblematic of a paradox at the heart of Cold War Asia: that cooperation and antagonism were not sequential phases but simultaneous conditions, coexisting within the same geopolitical space.
Keywords: Cold War; Sino‑Vietnamese Border; State‑Building; Sovereignty; Asian Studies; Archival Research.