This chapter analyzes the two states’ regulation of long-existing cross-border connections and their strategies to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable cross-border movements and to extract revenues from the acceptable ones between 1954 and 1957. The Chinese and Vietnamese communists pursued two interrelated goals at the territorial limits of their countries. First, they wanted to build an inward-oriented economy and society at their respective borders by consolidating the national administration of territory. Second, they sought to impose a contrived Cold War “comradeship” between the PRC and the DRV over and in place of the organic interdependence of peoples within the borderlands that had already existed for centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese border, therefore, encountered “joint state building” by the two communist governments, which made the cross-border movement of people and goods more visible, malleable, and, more importantly, taxable to the state. The pursuit of both national and international communist goals by central governments, however, often left the local state apparatus, which bore the burden of implementing these policies, confused and bogged down by conflicting priorities. Moreover, the culturally diverse and fluid on-the-ground realities of the borderlands did not fit easily into the nationalist or internationalist agenda of the two states.

This chapter examines how the Chinese and Vietnamese communists’ perceptions of the border, and their priorities and ability to project state power there, changed as they transformed from revolutionary insurrectionists to ruling elites during 1949–1954. As more areas under DRV’s control connected with Chinese territory, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists started to jointly enforce the international boundary, enhance the cohesion of state authorities over the margins of their power, and extract revenues by controlling cross-border flows of goods and people during the First Indochina War. State building by the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists at the border, however, remained asymmetric during this period. Due to the two parties’ different status in their respective countries, the contested social spaces of borderlands posed greater dangers to the Chinese revolutionary state during its political consolidation while offering greater opportunities to the wartime DRV state to obtain material for its struggle against the French colonial troops. During the First Indochina War, the Sino-Vietnamese border was a site of selective coercion. Both the PRC and the DRV steadily expanded their economic functions by extracting taxes and thrusting state-owned trade companies into the existing cross-border commercial networks.