The mountain is high, and the emperor is far away: states and smuggling networks at the Sino-Vietnamese border

The intense and volatile relations between China and Vietnam in the dyadic world of the Cold War have drawn scholarly attention to the strategic concerns of Beijing and Hanoi. In this article I move the level of analysis down to the border space where the peoples of the two countries meet on a daily basis. I examine the tug-of-war between the states and smuggling networks on the Sino-Vietnamese border during the second half of the twentieth century and its implications for the present-day bilateral relationship. I highlight that the existence of the historically nonstate space was a security concern for modernizing states in Asia during and after the Cold War, which is an understudied aspect of China’s relations with Vietnam and with its Asian neighbors more broadly. The border issue between China and its Asian neighbors concerned not only territorial disputes and demarcation but also the establishment of state authority in marginal societies.