On 20 June 2019, Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Pyongyang, becoming the first Chinese head of state to visit North Korea in fourteen years. The North Korean leadership treated the visit as a momentous occasion. Cheering, flag-waving crowds greeted Xi as his motorcade wound its way through the capital’s meticulously decorated streets. The Chinese leader was treated to a special “mass games” celebrating both the visit and the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In this distinctively North Korean propaganda spectacle, thousands of performers sang paeans to Sino-North Korean friendship and held up placards that formed a flattering image of Xi Jinping with the PRC’s national flag waving in the background. According to the North Korean state-run newspaper Rodong sinmun, these songs “deeply” conveyed “the revival of the Chinese nation and the ideological emotions of the Chinese people under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP].”Footnote ¹ Xi claimed that the grand reception had moved him deeply. He enthused, “I can feel it in the atmosphere everywhere that China and North Korea are close, like one family.”Footnote ²

China’s state-run media echoed Xi’s affectionate tone. The Xinhua News Agency published several editorials praising the long tradition of Sino-North Korean friendship with highly emotional language. One editorial pronounced that “Sino-North Korean friendship was as high as the mountains and as long as a river.” Chinese and North Korean leaders had “always maintained close contacts and come and go just as family members.” Emulating the PRC founder Mao Zedong’s penchant for numerical aphorisms, Xinhua laid out what it termed the “three unchangeables” of Sino-North Korean friendship. It promised that regardless of changes in the international situation, “the firm position of the Chinese government and CCP to consolidate and develop Sino-North Korean friendship will not change, the close feelings of the Chinese people for the North Korean people will not change, [and] China’s support for socialist North Korea will not change.” These “three unchangeables” demonstrated “China’s deep feelings for the North Korean people and the demeanor and determination of a country that has assumed the responsibility of a great power.” The editorial concluded with a call for greater friendship between the two neighboring countries: “Sino-North Korean friendship is as high as the mountains and as long as a river, [it is] extremely precious; the wind and rain are shared together and [the friendship] becomes more resolute with the passing of time.”Footnote ³

Some political commentators rightfully pointed out that these affectionate words and gestures masked underlying tensions between Beijing and Pyongyang. The prominent North Korea expert Andrei Lankov called Xi’s visit a “good diplomatic move” but still considered the “lavish show of comradely friendship” to be “insincere.”Footnote ⁴ Sino-North Korean relations had in fact been strained during the years before the summit and ties between the two countries were certainly not as intimate as they had once been. North Korean missile launches during major international conferences hosted by the PRC had embarrassed Beijing while China’s support for United Nations (UN) sanctions contributed to an unquestionable chill in the relationship.Footnote ⁵ And yet, the old reliable slogans of Sino-North Korean friendship had resurfaced as if there had never been even the slightest disharmony between Beijing and Pyongyang.

Historically speaking, the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship was critical to both China and North Korea. This book argues that without it the PRC and the DPRK would never have succeeded as communist states. Beyond the political, military, and economic cooperation that occurred under its auspices, Sino-North Korean friendship was an invaluable tool for both the CCP and the Korean Workers Party (KWP) to promote ideological solidarity and, more importantly, shape the emotions of their subjects. During the Korean War, when the Chinese People’s Volunteer Forces (CPVF) and the Korean People’s Army (KPA) fought side-by-side, party leaders encouraged Chinese and North Koreans to grieve each other’s losses and celebrate each other’s victories. Long after the war, the CCP and KWP invoked the shared traumas suffered during its violent course to cultivate mutual empathy among their people. It was an integral part of a much larger effort by these two new regimes to extend their rule over all segments of society and remake individuals into loyal socialist subjects.

This book does not disagree with much recent work on Sino-North Korean relations so much as it asks a different set of questions. In his meticulously detailed study of Sino-DPRK relations, The Last Celestial Empire (Zuihou de tianchao in Chinese), the Chinese scholar Shen Zhihua uses a broad array of Russian and Chinese sources to argue that the idea of an unbreakable Sino-North Korean friendship was a “myth.”Footnote ⁶ Shen seeks to peer through the veil created by the almost ubiquitous clichés about the Sino-North Korean alliance being a “friendship forged in blood” or a “friendship that will be passed down from generation to generation.” The myth, he contends, is like an “enchanted gold hoop that is firmly wrapped around people’s heads with the outside encircled by a mysterious veil that is difficult to pierce and makes it hard to see clearly.”Footnote ⁷ While Shen’s work is the most detailed and compelling on the subject, many scholars in the United States have espoused similar views, contending that Sino-North Korean relations have long been defined by friction rather than friendship.Footnote ⁸ Patrick McEachern, for instance, writes that China and North Korea “feigned something of a special relationship,” but in reality ties between the two had been “fraught from the beginning.”Footnote ⁹ Drawing heavily on Shen’s work, Julia Lovell also sees insincerity and veiled tension as the most significant features of Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang. She writes: “For almost seven decades, small, capricious, ungracious North Korea has somehow managed to manipulate its bigger, stronger, richer neighbor into being a lifeline of support.”Footnote ¹⁰

Shen and others have unquestionably brought to light the serious disagreements between Chinese and North Korean leaders over wartime strategy, de-Stalinization, and economic policy. Before the “New Cold War History” emerged during the 1990s and inspired scholars to engage in multinational, multi-archival research, these quarrels were poorly understood. We knew little about strategic disagreements between Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung during the Korean War, and the few accounts of the 1956 August Plenum in English said little or nothing about the joint intervention by China and the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹ But there are also a number of very important questions that this analytical framework leaves unanswered: Why did both the Chinese and North Korean states work so hard to propagate this “myth” and encourage their subjects to believe in it even when tensions flared between their leaders? If the “myth” of Sino-North Korean Friendship functioned as an impenetrable veil that made it difficult to see underlying tensions, then wasn’t this “myth” in fact a lived reality for millions of Chinese and North Koreans? And if they believed in it, then how did it influence their actions, behaviors, and feelings? Finally, why remain so devoted to expressing and printing such strongly affective idioms even when CCP and KWP leaders were bickering?

The most important reason that the idea of an eternal and unbreakable Sino-North Korean friendship remained so prominent was that it was indispensable for communist state building in China and North Korea. Regardless of the state of political relations, this friendship was central to how the CCP and KWP wanted Chinese and North Koreans to see their place in the world. Through constantly representing each other with sympathy and compassion, the PRC and the DPRK inculcated their citizenry with a set of normative emotions that also helped to build a sense of communist subjectivity. The anthropologist William Reddy has written that a “set of emotional norms” along with various mechanisms for expressing and inculcating them are “a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.”Footnote ¹² For Reddy, the most important means for political rulers to maintain their legitimacy and authority is neither military coercion nor material incentives. It is “emotional control” that is “the real site of the exercise of power.”Footnote ¹³ From this perspective, when Chinese and North Korean leaders repeatedly insisted that their peoples must “share weal and woe together” or praised the “profound” or “unbreakable” friendship between their countries, they were not simply repeating favored idioms but giving instructions about how people should feel. They aimed to create a common set of emotional norms and expressions that their subjects would constantly perform and reproduce. They understood that conformity to these state-sanctioned modes of emotional expression was critical to strengthening their hold over popular consciousness and maintaining the allegiance of their populations.

Securing the loyalty of their populations was critical for both China and North Korea. Inaugurated in 1948 and 1949, the DPRK and the PRC were both very new states when the Korean War erupted. Their prospects were still murky and the long-term acquiescence of their populations questionable. Feelings of mistrust and suspicion of the CCP, which had risen to power only after a bitter and protracted struggle against the rival Guomindang, were still widespread on the Chinese mainland. Many Chinese felt ambivalent about launching the country into a military conflict when economic reconstruction was so desperately needed at home. Even after the war began, anti-communist activities continued to surface in both urban and rural areas, especially those where support for the Guomindang had generally been high during the civil war.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, the events of the Korean War underscored the fact that Kim Il Sung’s regime in North Korea was still not universally accepted. When UN and Republic of Korea (ROK) forces had temporarily occupied North Korean territory during the fall of 1950, uprisings against the KWP broke out and many people aided the occupying forces. The top leaders in the party were undoubtedly troubled by how both KWP party members and ordinary citizens had abandoned or turned against the regime so quickly during a time of crisis.Footnote ¹⁵

The Korean War and the Sino-North Korean alliance became an integral part of the legitimizing narratives of both states. Both states could represent the war – with little regard for factual accuracy – as a heroic struggle against a wealthy imperialist power with vastly superior weapons. Because they had fought side-by-side against a common adversary, China and North Korea naturally represented each other as heroic and resilient. The CCP constantly praised North Korea’s stoic resistance in the face of horrific acts of aggression perpetrated by the United States. The Kim regime similarly extolled the sacrifices that the Chinese volunteers and their families had made to defend Korea. Both official representations encouraged Chinese and North Korean people to imagine each other’s circumstances in ways that stirred empathy and compassion. Several historians have suggested that stirring hatred of American imperialism and China’s enemies helped the CCP to mobilize the population and accomplish domestic political objectives.Footnote ¹⁶ This was true, but loyal socialist subjects could not be motivated by hatred and anger alone, they also needed outlets for other emotions such as sympathy and love. These emotions became an important unifying force in the domestic setting. In China, for instance, the campaign to “Resist America – Aid Korea” (kang Mei yuan Chao) not only stirred sympathy for North Koreans but also created a powerful sense of ideological and emotional consanguinity among Chinese. And, by a similar token, even in shedding tears for Chinese volunteers and their families, North Koreans were reminded of their own victimhood and struggle for independence. The emotions of socialist internationalism paradoxically produced the very sense of national identity and party loyalty that was needed to cement these two new states.

This argument takes the favored idioms about the relationship, such as China and North Korea being “as close as lips and teeth” or Sino-North Korean friendship being “forged in blood,” seriously. They were commonplaces, but there were reasons they became commonplaces, and they should not be dismissed as mere window dressing. Indeed, historians of emotions have argued that it is exactly this kind of rhetorical trope that we need to pay greater attention to when trying to understand the emotional norms of different times and places. Barbara H. Rosenwein, one of the leading scholars in this field writes, “As a researcher of emotions, I actually welcome commonplaces, for they tell me precisely how people think they and others feel – or at least should feel.”Footnote ¹⁷ Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung could on some occasions bitterly disagree, but there almost always remained some important commonalities in how they wanted – and indeed needed – their peoples to feel.

In arguing that these ideals and tropes of Sino-North Korean solidarity served important domestic purposes, I do not mean to argue, however, that they were irrelevant to the political relationship or that they merely reflected a kind of artifice on the part of Chinese and North Korean leaders. These ideals influenced political relations between Beijing and Pyongyang in their own distinctive way. The disagreements between Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong that Shen and others have pointed to unquestionably produced their share of anger and frustration. But because Sino-North Korean friendship was so important to producing loyal subjects in both countries, neither the CCP nor the KWP could afford to allow the relationship to deteriorate too far. Moreover, the leaders themselves could not – at least publicly – deviate from the emotional norms of the alliance. They needed to observe and perform these norms or else risk attenuating their capacity to kindle national identity and patriotism. Finally, despite their occasional conflicts, it would be wrong to say that Mao, Kim, and other high-ranking officials did not at times genuinely feel mutual affection and friendship. As in any genuine familial relationship they could feel kinship and closeness at some times and mistrust and alienation at others. At times, Mao and Kim promoted Sino-North Korean friendship in a cynical and self-interested way, but at other times they were projecting some of their own emotions onto those they governed. In their efforts to shape popular sentiment, Chinese and North Korean leaders most often focused on several key emotions that were particularly effective at mobilizing support for the alliance.

Regimes of Empathy

There were two especially prominent emotional norms in the Sino-North Korean alliance: the first was mutual empathy, and the second was revolutionary sentimentalism based in shared Chinese and Korean conceptions of feelings. There is an extensive literature on both empathy and sentimentalism, and scholars do not completely agree on their meaning. Some caveats are necessary in using these terms to write about China and North Korea. They have both been used predominantly to describe the Western and European experience of emotions, and neither China nor North Korea used these terms frequently during the Cold War. At the same time, they offer the best English language approximation of the emotions that undergirded the Sino-North Korean alliance.

While the meaning of empathy has evolved over time, today scholars in a wide variety of disciplines define it as the imaginative reconstruction of another person or group’s situation so that one experiences feelings and emotions that more closely resemble those of the other party.Footnote ¹⁸ Martin L. Hoffman, a psychologist who devoted much of his career to studying empathy, defined it as “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with one’s own situation.”Footnote ¹⁹ Along similar lines, the noted legal scholar Martha C. Nussbaum has called empathy “the ability to imagine the situation of the other, taking the other’s perspective.”Footnote ²⁰ According to these definitions, one might feel sad in learning of another’s loss without suffering a loss oneself or feel distressed when seeing another person in pain even while remaining completely unharmed. Empathy is by no means confined to painful emotions, however; it also encompasses joyful ones.Footnote ²¹ One can just as easily feel pleasure due to another’s success or victory as grief due to another’s difficulties.

Empathy’s power as a motivational force derives from the other emotions that it can give rise to. It helps to establish concern and connection between people and thereby to facilitate compassion. Compassion differs from empathy in that it does not mean sharing another’s emotional state but is a “painful” emotion or form of distress caused by another’s suffering.Footnote ²² The renowned psychologist Richard S. Lazarus defined compassion as “being moved by another’s suffering and wanting to help.”Footnote ²³ It was compassion’s capacity to move people to take action on behalf of the suffering that made it such an important outgrowth of empathy in the context of Chinese intervention in the Korean War. Empathy also moves people to act through kindling “empathic anger.” When people empathize with the victims of a crime or act of violence, they often feel as if they have been vicariously attacked and thus feel angry at the perpetrator. Empathic anger also lends itself to both support for the victim and aggressive action against the culprit.Footnote ²⁴ All of these characteristics of empathy make it a powerful tool for political leaders seeking to motivate self-sacrificing behavior from their subjects.

China and North Korea encouraged mutual empathy in the broadest sense – their citizens were to mourn each other’s pain and exalt in each other’s triumphs. They rarely used contemporary Chinese or Korean translations of the word empathy to describe their feelings or actions. Indeed, the English term empathy was only beginning to take on its contemporary meaning during the 1950s, and it did not become part of the popular lexicon in the United States until the 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ Yet the absence of the term from Chinese and Korean usage at the time does not mean that it was not felt and experienced. Many scientists have argued that empathy is a universal human capacity rooted in the activity of mirror neurons in the brain and that people therefore experience empathy regardless of their language or culture.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, both the Chinese and North Korean states constantly demanded that their citizens imagine the situation of their allies on the opposite side of the Yalu River. They used rhetoric, propaganda, cultural programs, and everyday activities to encourage this kind of empathy. The favored idioms of the alliance often served the same purpose. For instance, the four-character Chinese phrase tonggangongku 同甘共苦, which is usually translated as “share weal and woe together,” more literally means “same joys common pain.” It was an exhortation for Chinese to seek to understand North Koreans to a degree that would enable them to agonize when they suffered and take joy in their successes.

Empathy was a critical official emotion for the CCP and KWP, not only because it inspired popular support for Sino-North Korean friendship but also because it depended in part on one’s capacity to distinguish oneself from another.Footnote ²⁷ Empathy for another’s pain or joy cannot be experienced without engaging with a representation of this other. And these representations can paradoxically sustain and reify difference even when they invite identification with the other’s situation. As Sarah Ahmed has argued, empathy sustains “the very differences that it may seek to overcome.”Footnote ²⁸ When Chinese and North Koreans grieved each other’s pain and raged at the hardships that imperialism inflicted on their allies, they also became more self-aware. Chinese could feel a unique degree of empathy for North Koreans because of their own revolutionary nationalist subjectivity. And, by a similar token, even in embracing empathy for Chinese volunteers and their families, North Koreans were reminded of their own victimhood and struggle for independence. The emotions of socialist internationalism thus produced the very sense of national identity and party loyalty that was needed to cement these two new states.

The sentimentalism that prevailed in Sino-North Korean relations had a distinctive style influenced by the powerful tide of revolutionary nationalism that gave rise to both states. Definitions of sentimentalism have differed both among and within various academic disciplines. I am using the term here not as a literary genre or a moral philosophy but as a kind of behavior. Reddy has explained that sentimentalism has been characterized by, among other things, “enthusiasm for emotional expression and intimacy.”Footnote ²⁹ In eighteenth-century France, he writes, extreme expressions of feeling were considered a virtue in many circumstances, while passions were something to be shown and not hidden.Footnote ³⁰ While Cold War China and North Korea were politically and culturally dissimilar to Enlightenment-era France in many ways, they shared its zeal for emotional expression. Chinese and North Koreans were expected to make overt displays of feelings when they interacted, regardless of whether they were party leaders, soldiers, or members of cultural troupes. They expressed their admiration and affection for each other while denouncing imperialism and other enemies with great affective hyperbole.

During their interactions, Chinese and North Koreans used a consistent and similar vocabulary to express mutual affection. They often spoke of how they were deeply “moved” or “touched” by each other’s actions and resistance to imperialism. The Chinese and Korean words that they used to express these feelings were derived from the same etymological roots. Chinese frequently used the term gandong 感动, which is comprised of two Chinese characters. The first of these, gan, is most often understood as signifying “feelings,” while dong has generally been translated as “to move” or “to stir.” The term has usually been translated as “moving.” Chinese often referred to the actions or words of their North Korean allies as “very moving to us” or “dui women hen gandong.” North Koreans used the Sino-Korean word kamdong, which was borrowed directly from gandong and written with the same Chinese characters in Sino-Korean script. North Koreans often explained how the words and deeds of their Chinese comrades had made them “very emotional” or were “very emotional to them” through using kamdongjŏk, the adjectival form of kamdong. While the term gandong/kamdong conveys a high degree of emotional intensity, it is neutral when it comes to the specific kinds of emotions that it describes. Gandong does not necessarily connote joy or sadness and its exact meaning varies in different contexts. During interactions between Chinese and North Koreans, use of the term often aimed to express emotional intimacy and consanguinity of feeling.

This highly sentimental discourse was often accompanied by physical manifestations of emotion. Crying was an especially prominent feature of Sino-North Korean interactions. Tearful outpourings have long been a distinctive feature of emotional life in North Korea and remained so well into the twenty-first century. Many Western observers were simultaneously fascinated and bewildered by images of North Koreans wailing passionately after the death of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il in 2011.Footnote ³¹ During the 1950s and 1960s, these tears were not reserved for the Kim family. With the encouragement of official propaganda, North Korean civilians often cried for or together with Chinese volunteers serving in Korea. Chinese were expected to show tears when they heard about North Korea’s hardships, and visiting North Korean troupes performing in China often provoked intense bursts of wailing from their audiences. These performances not only fostered empathy for North Korea but also helped to unify Chinese through creating shared emotional experiences.

In both China and North Korea, the emotional norms of the alliance were constantly enforced, replicated and habituated through what Reddy has termed “strict emotional regimes” – milieus where those with political power carefully regulate emotional expression. According to Reddy, all political regimes “must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions.” Some of these “emotional regimes” are “strict and require individuals to express normative emotions and avoid deviant emotions.” In strict regimes, there is a narrow range of permissible emotional expressions or “emotives,” which are “structured through ceremony or official art forms.” Individuals are repeatedly prompted to express state sanctioned emotions with the expectation that they will be “enhanced or habituated.” Those who refuse to do so are faced with the prospect of punishment.Footnote ³² In Cold War–era China and North Korea, political leaders, party cadres, soldiers, or peasants were all expected to demonstrate empathy for their allied comrades and participate in the culture of sentimentalism regardless of the circumstances.

What makes Reddy’s conception of an emotional regime especially useful for understanding how emotions influenced Sino-North Korean relations is its deft handling of the distinction between performed and felt emotions. There has been a long-standing distinction between those who emphasize “affects,” which they argue are universal, prelinguistic physiological responses that function independent of cognition, on the one hand, and “cognitivists,” who argue that emotions are culturally specific, contingent on how situations are perceived, and manifested through performance or vocalization.Footnote ³³ While Reddy does not completely settle the debate, he points to an important way in which the physiological and cognitive aspects of emotion and feeling are interrelated. He notes that expressing emotions often has a “self-altering effect” and that claims about one’s emotional state often do call up feelings and even physiological changes appropriate to the claim. This does not happen all the time. In any emotional regime, the same emotional utterances affect individuals in different ways with some more able to reconcile their feelings with the utterances than others. Nonetheless, in strict emotional regimes, many subjects do habituate the state sanctioned emotional norms, in part because it is easier than to face the strict punishments that come with expressing deviant emotions. Thus, a significant number of people find that the “strict emotional discipline of their regime works well for them, shoring up a personal management style that serves as the core of a coherent, rewarding way of life.”Footnote ³⁴

Yet while these conspicuous displays of emotion between Chinese and North Koreans doubtless reflected accommodation with the state to some degree, I believe that there was also a powerful voluntary component. Despite their authoritarian nature, there was much in the messages of the CCP and KWP that resonated with the people whom they governed. In the post-Cold War, post-communist era in which Chinese attitudes toward domestic and global politics have drifted far from the foundational ideas of the state, it is easy to be skeptical that Chinese or Koreans ever truly believed in the precepts of Maoism or international socialism. It is important to remember, however, that in the aftermath of decades of colonialism and war, Chinese and North Korean communism both offered an empowering new identity for their subjects. The PRC and the DPRK rode to power on a tidal wave of revolutionary nationalism by restoring national pride and promising to improve living standards. Writing about Stalinism in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the historian Stephen Kotkin explains, “When a compelling revolutionary vision resembling the ‘higher truth’ of a revealed religion is refracted through patriotic concerns and a real rise in revolutionary stature we should not underestimate the popular will to believe or, more accurately, the willing suspension of disbelief.”Footnote ³⁵ Whatever else can be said about the disastrous economic and humanitarian conditions that eventually accompanied communist rule in China and North Korea, it is difficult to deny that both the CCP and the KWP offered, if anything, a more compelling revolutionary vision than the one Kotkin describes in Soviet Russia. This vision did create a powerful will to believe and enhanced the state-sanctioned emotional regimes by injecting a popular, bottom-up component.

This is not to say that the CCP and KWP’s attempts at large-scale emotional guidance were without their limitations. Measures of apathy and defiance always persisted. It is certainly not my argument that all Chinese and North Koreans completely embraced Sino-North Korean Friendship. Scholars working on Cold War–era China and North Korea have pointed to the survival of different forms of “everyday resistance” to the state’s objectives, and these were also a critical part of the lived experience of Chinese and North Koreans during this era.Footnote ³⁶ In the pages that follow, I do in some instances show that resistance, apathy, and ignorance were significant obstacles that the CCP and KWP encountered. Yet my emphasis is more on how the states tried to manage and control these problems than it is on this resistance itself. While this was an ongoing project for both the CCP and KWP, they managed to mobilize their populations to cooperate both in wartime and in peacetime, making possible not only a long bitter fight against the United States but also expansive post-war economic aid and cultural exchange programs. Ultimately, Sino-North Korean friendship helped to give rise to two durable revolutionary states that governed regions which had for centuries been under dynastic and colonial rule. It played a critical role in consolidating the Chinese and North Korean regimes at a pivotal moment in their development. And today, the CCP and KWP still govern, while most other socialist parties collapsed or lost power during the 1990s.

Most of the individual chapters in this book look at how different groups performed and habituated the key emotional norms of Sino-North Korean friendship. Four of the five main chapters focus primarily on the period between 1949 and 1965. These years represented not only the high point of the Sino-North Korean alliance but also a period in which the communist parties of both states consolidated their power. Close relations certainly did not end in 1965, but the combination of the Cultural Revolution and domestic political changes that swept North Korea and China during the late 1960s and early 1970s greatly diminished the importance of Sino-North Korean friendship.

China’s relationship with Korea predated the Cold War by centuries, if not millennia. In prior centuries, common ideals had also informed Chinese and Korean state-building. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, both the Ming and Chosŏn dynasties relied on neo-Confucianism to establish their political legitimacy and order social relations.Footnote ³⁷ The somewhat ritualistic character of Sino-North Korean relations during the Cold War era, with its constant repetition of familiar phrases and idioms, also harkened back in some ways to the even more formal rituals that had been practiced during earlier periods.Footnote ³⁸ Yet I have generally avoided drawing comparisons between the Cold War era and the long dynastic period in this book because it could too easily lead to essentializing the complex web of diplomatic and cultural patterns that characterized the relationship before the twentieth century. Moreover, as revolutionary states, both the PRC and the DPRK sought very explicitly to break with what they saw as their feudal and backward pasts to build a new more equal relationship based on fraternal socialism. Even if they did not always succeed at this task, the ideological and emotional guidance that they gave to their citizens encouraged them to think of themselves as modern socialist subjects who were liberated from the shackles of colonialism and feudalism.

The first chapter explores the interactions of high-level Chinese and North Korean leaders. Cults of personality, which promoted the adoration and worship of political rulers, were important to both Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung. These cults imbued the words and actions of leaders with a powerful influence on popular emotions. The chapter looks at the actions of Mao, Kim, and other leading CCP and KWP officials. It shows how these leaders expressed and performed emotional norms and how these norms influenced diplomatic protocols.

The second chapter looks at the Chinese volunteers who fought in the Korean War and subsequently played an important role in North Korea’s reconstruction. It examines both how the CCP sought to inculcate the volunteers with empathy for North Koreans and how North Koreans were in turn encouraged to demonstrate compassion for the volunteers.

Chapter 3 turns its attention to mid-level party cadres and other skilled professionals. It focuses on a variety of professional exchange programs in which these cadres became acquainted and interacted. I show how the Chinese and North Korean states encouraged dedication to both the party and the emotional norms of the alliance through these programs.

The fourth chapter covers cultural exchanges. It shows how the performing arts became an important part of the Sino-North Korean relationship during the Korean War and remained a priority of the CCP and KWP leadership throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Theatrical productions were an especially powerful means for promoting mutual empathy because they encouraged vicarious identification with their performers.

The final chapter looks at Sino-North Korean relations during the years after 1965 and 1992. It argues that both China and North Korea went through significant albeit very different political and economic transformations during these years. Yet, the CCP and KWP continued to revitalize the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship on some occasions. Ironically, Sino-North Korean friendship sometimes helped to foster acceptance of changes that would ultimately diminish its importance to Chinese and North Korean legitimacy narratives. I demonstrate how, by the late 1980s, popular Chinese and North Korean discourse about the alliance changed meaningfully.

This book draws on a wide array of Chinese, North Korean, and former Communist Bloc materials. Though research at some of the most important Chinese archives has become increasingly restricted during the last decade, I acquired a significant number of documents from the PRC Foreign Ministry Archive before 2013, when access was still relatively open. Colleagues have also shared materials they gathered from this archive, enabling me to more fully understand high-level Sino-North Korean interactions. Most of these materials are confined to the period between 1949 and 1965 because the foreign ministry never declassified materials relating to the late 1960s onward. While the high-level policy documents have become more difficult to access, I found that the provincial and municipal archives were still relatively open and offered a different but nonetheless very intriguing window into the Sino-North Korean relationship. These materials documented cultural exchange programs, internship and training programs, as well as meetings between Chinese and North Korean party cadres responsible for local governance. They offered insights into how the CCP strove to embed its sanctioned emotional norms into the realm of everyday life.

For obvious reasons, I could not travel to North Korea to do research on this book. Yet, as Andre Schmid has recently noted, although going to North Korea is difficult for most scholars, serious research on the country is far from impossible.Footnote ³⁹ I did find important North Korean materials at the Library of Congress and the National Institute for Korean History in Seoul. North Korea – much like South Korea – had a surprisingly rich print culture during the 1950s and 1960s given the devastation that it had suffered during the war. This print culture encompassed news and literary magazines, trade journals, children’s magazines, and dozens of other publications, many of which were collected by the Library of Congress.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some of these print materials clearly served propaganda purposes. They included articles praising the achievements of the regime and its allies while demonizing the United States and South Korea. Yet propaganda is useful for understanding emotional norms because it offers a window into how the state wants people to think and feel. Reading North Korean propaganda about the Great Leap Forward, China’s leaders, or the Chinese Revolution offers insights into the image of the PRC that the KWP wanted to create. While there were obvious limits on the range of permissible discourse in these journals, some articles reflected a kind of participatory propaganda that was different from straightforward reports. They included essays by North Korean party cadres and performers who had visited the PRC through exchange programs describing their experiences and interactions with Chinese people. They also included letters and essays by people describing how they had been helped by Chinese volunteers.

Sources produced by authoritarian communist regimes understandably invite some skepticism as their authors no doubt faced significant top-down pressures in how they represented events and their own views. I acknowledge this at some places in the book. Despite the constraints that they were written under, however, these sources often contained distinctive information about individual experiences that was not completely dictated by the state. Rather, these materials tend to reflect the ambiguous and mutually dependent relationship between domination and agency in Cold War communist regimes that Cheehyung Harrison Kim has described in his work on North Korea.Footnote ⁴¹ Completely a product of neither state repression nor individual agency, many of these materials demonstrate how subjects reached an accommodation with the ideological and emotional norms of the regime that governed them.

Finally, this book uses archival sources from the United States and the former Communist Bloc. The collection of captured enemy materials from the Korean War contained in the US National Archives included a variety of propaganda pamphlets, booklets, and newspapers carried by Chinese and North Korean forces. While I did not visit archives in Russia or Eastern Europe, I gained access to translated materials from the Wilson Center and colleagues who had worked in these countries. At the same time, I have given these materials less emphasis than have some other scholars. The main reason is that while these documents often contain valuable information about political and economic developments, they don’t offer as much insight into the thoughts and feelings of Chinese and Koreans as more indigenous sources do. Rather than creating a narrative of Sino-North Korean relations that is based on how Soviets or Eastern Europeans viewed the two countries, I am more interested in understanding how Chinese and North Koreans saw themselves and each other. Despite my efforts to use both Chinese and North Korean sources, however, there are still some inevitable imbalances in coverage. While the environment for doing research in China has become increasingly difficult, Chinese sources are still far more available (and more searchable) than North Korean materials. Therefore, some portions of this book cover Chinese motives, policies, and behaviors in greater detail than those of North Koreans.

Throughout these chapters, I demonstrate how the emotional norms of the Sino-North Korean friendship were continuously inculcated and performed in both states. These norms shaped the interactions between CCP and KWP party cadres at all levels – influencing what they said and how they acted. Although mutual empathy and sentimentalism did not always determine policy, they set the context in which decisions were made and set parameters for the relationship which were almost never crossed. Moreover, the Sino-North Korean relationship and its accompanying emotional norms were critical to the construction of modern socialist subjects on both sides of the Yalu. It was in part through their interactions and their shared feelings about past trauma that many Chinese and North Koreans came to fully understand themselves as part of a broader revolutionary movement. Ultimately, neither the durability of the Sino-North Korean alliance nor the success of the Chinese and North Korean states at consolidating their power can be understood without reference to the emotional regime that both helped to construct.