When Chinese Commissar Met Jim Crow: An Untold History of Racial Struggle in the Korean War Prisoners of War Camps

Abstract

During the Korean War, it has been claimed that the Chinese People's Volunteer (CPV) army “brainwashed” the American prisoners of war (POWs) into automatons. Recently declassified Chinese documents shed new light on a racial perspective in this story. Although the CPV activated an ambitious communist indoctrination program for the POWs in early 1951, the anticipated ideological struggle did not take place. By June 1951, the Chinese commissars overseeing American POWs discovered that these Americans were not the “proletariat brothers” deceived by the Wall Street financial capitalists. Rather, many of them rallied around Ku Klux Klan organizations to disrupt camp order and to resist the Chinese indoctrination. After mid-1951, the CPV essentially abandoned the goal of ideological conversion and prioritized controlling the POWs through none ideological means of alienation, self-punishment, and self-policing.