| Summary/Abstract |
This article challenges the dualistic perspective of power politics in traditional Cold War studies. It focuses on the reshaping of maritime boundaries of contemporary China and the subsequent changes in fishermen/women's everyday lives in the process of the localization of the Cold War. In Xiamen, the geospatial politicization of the Taiwan Strait led to the birth of a distinguished Cold War front, which was both a fishing ground and a battlefield. Using a combination of traditional textual sources and ethnographic-style fieldwork, this research refers to what communism meant to fishing people by focusing on how they strategically constructed and transformed their livelihood, cultural, military, and political identities in the Cold War. This article discovers that the reasons why fishermen/women could cross multiple boundaries stemmed from the control and utilization of their mobility by the socialist state. Meanwhile, fishermen/women were also flexibly using their maritime mobility, ocean experience, and survival logic to adapt to the socialist transformation, internalizing their adherence to the communist camp in daily life. For both the CPC government and ordinary fishermen/women, they not only participated and practiced the Cold War but also redefined the Cold War due to their actual actions, representing rich and diverse meanings of the Cold War across the boundaries of contemporary China.
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