The “Resist America, Aid Korea” movement was the PRC’s inaugural deployment of sustained anti-foreign propaganda to secure domestic legitimation and drive social transformation. This article, grounded in theories of autocratic legitimation, identity studies, and scholarship on China’s myth of national humiliation, argues that RAAK’s demonization of the American Other—tied to internal adversaries—served to rally public support through patriotic indoctrination and justify repression of regime opponents. These functions proved essential not only for prevailing in the Korean War but also for cementing the nascent PRC regime and propelling its revolutionary agenda. The evidence is drawn from a rich corpus of CCP documents, media, and textual and visual propaganda. Especially from early 1951, as the war reached a stalemate and the Party shifted focus inward, RAAK and domestic campaigns of class struggle and political purges became increasingly intertwined through shared organizational networks and unified messaging. At its core lay a “grand conspiracy” narrative that leveraged the “black sheep effect” in social psychology to frame internal foes as US collaborators, thereby legitimizing their suppression or reeducation. This study underscores the CCP’s deliberate fusion of foreign and domestic enemies to maximize mobilization and control during a pivotal phase of PRC state- and nation-building. It provides critical insight into contemporary CCP rhetoric, which revives this earlier strategy by casting domestic dissidents as agents of “foreign hostile forces.”
Y. He (Thu,) studied this question.