This dissertation argues that national integration was the ultimate but inadvertent legacy of radical Maoism. The study examines the chauvinist effects, and reactions to them, of Chinese socialist hegemony in the Maoist era (1949--1976), focusing on ethnic Koreans in Yanbian. This region in eastern Manchuria lies within China's present-day borders, but historically had never truly been a Chinese territory. Since the early twentieth century, Korean migrants transformed themselves from a settler community into an economically flourishing and politically autonomous enclave. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party successfully incorporated Yanbian into the Chinese polity for the first time through rhetorical power of Maoism and policies of socialist modernization that included both Han and Koreans. Their fortunes were reversed, however, during the Great Leap Forward (1958--1960) and the Cultural Revolution (1966--1976), when radical Maoist interpretations of "class unity" made their Korean-ness itself a form of "sabotage" against communism. Han Maoists purged ethnic Koreans from local government, branding them opponents of the Maoist vision of a utopian society. Ethnic Koreans were reduced to second-class citizens and lost their former autonomy.

By analyzing this history through a frontier perspective, with attention to the dynamic relations between Chinese socialism and nationalism, this study bridges the gap between the intellectual history of Maoism and the ethnic history of Maoist China. It demonstrates how ideological and geopolitical factors, more than shared culture, shaped China's national margins. Because the cultural achievements of ethnic Koreans frustrated Han Maoists' ideology of the "civilizing mission," their persecution was effected not by blatant ethnocentrism but by communist radicalism in which China's ethnic groups should emerge as a unified, "ethnic-less" people. This begged the question about what cultural form this new people should take. Based on the Maoist interpretation of materialism, the new cultural form was to be determined by the Han-led economic base, which meant that Han Chinese culture became the common form for the new people. This was the sinicization of Marxism. Although the Maoist dream of a communist utopia failed, Yanbian became an inalienable part of socialist China, and ethnic Koreans came to identify themselves as Chinese.