American Foreign Policy, Kim Jong-un, North Korea, North Korea foreign relations, US Department of State, US-North Korea relations

North Koreans Watching Fox

This post operates on sanity-preserving ground rules: No referring to: think-pieces, think-tank analyses, journalistic hot takes, outraged or absurd Tweets (other than those thumbed out by POTUS), Chuck Schumer’s courageous stand against a commemorative coin, or speculation about what this consistently incoherent White House intends to do. Do not engage with the orgy of clickbait flowing out of the inexplicable leak from the Pompeo/Andrew Kim … Continue reading North Koreans Watching Fox

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Kim Jong-un, My Publications, North Korea, North Korea foreign relations, Op-Ed

On the Perils of Journalistic Moonlighting for Academics

The inter-Korean summit which occurred on 27 April coincided with a rare trench of open time and full energy for me, so I was able to write three pieces in response. None of these is full of blistering insights per se, but perhaps by discussing their production in aggregate I can convey something useful about the way the world of journalistic commentary works for academics, … Continue reading On the Perils of Journalistic Moonlighting for Academics

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Chinese communist party, Chinese foreign policy, Kim Jong-un, North Korea foreign relations, People's Republic of China, Sino-North Korean relations, US-North Korea relations

Thunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit

Amid the welter of diplomatic moves that have occurred in and around the Korean peninsula in 2018, the two meetings in quick succession between the North Korean leader and China’s eternally-consolidating leader, Xi Jinping, have been one of the more curious elements. After a six-year hiatus from meeting foreign leaders at all, Kim’s mode of turning so suddenly back to China was indeed extraordinary. The … Continue reading Thunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit

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Art, China, Chinese communist party, Chinese nationalism, civil war, Cold War History, Cultural Politics, Korean War, Mao Zedong, My Publications, U.S.-China Relations

Walls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951

The rise and ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war, and Mao’s galvanizing intervention into the Korean War, was accompanied and supported by a wave of cultural propaganda that depicted the CCP as the strongest defenders and representatives of the Chinese nation. This paper looks at an array of cartoons from the late 1940s and early 50s to argue that … Continue reading Walls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951

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Cultural Politics, Hip-hop, North Korea, Propaganda, Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, US-North Korea relations, 新闻自由

Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives

A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on this issue for the last decade has allowed me to say a few not completely ignorant things about it for a wider public. [Updated 6 April 2018:] This morning I spoke about it with Canada’s … Continue reading Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives

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Beijing, China, Chinese foreign policy, North Korea, North Korea foreign relations, Sino-North Korean relations, 新闻自由

Media Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit

Among the dozens of subplots feeding into and out of the curious-but-necessary welcome by Xi Jinping of Kim Jong-un this week is the question of information access and what it means or doesn’t mean about the robustness of the overall Chinese-North Korean relationship. I put together a few preliminary thoughts on this for an outlet based in Seoul, and link and some shorter excerpts of … Continue reading Media Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit

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American Foreign Policy, China, Chinese nationalism, civil war, Cold War History, Korean War, Manchuria, Mao Zedong, People's Republic of China, U.S.-China Relations, US Department of State, US-North Korea relations

New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the Korean War

My two new book reviews engage with the intelligence history of two chaotic decades in China, and the British role in the Korean War, respectively. Review of Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The Secret War for China: Espionage, Revolution and the Rise of Mao (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). Forthcoming in War in History (submitted 10 March 2018) Panagiotis Dimitrakis has clearly had a lot of fun compiling this … Continue reading New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the Korean War

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Art, China, Cultural Politics, history and memory, My Publications, People's Republic of China, Propaganda, U.S.-China Relations, US occupation of Japan, US-Japan relations

Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War

I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a “cognate field” during my doctoral studies at Ohio University, and with inspiration and advice from Temple University’s John Lent, a pioneer in  global comic book scholarship whose research on cartoonists (漫画家) and cartooning in the early PRC has been foundational to … Continue reading Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War

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Cultural Politics, German, German-Japanese Relations, War Crimes, World War II

Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the Fascist Period

This is the first in a multi-post project on German geographers and intellectuals and their interaction with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, with a nominal focus on Manchuria and the border region between Manchukuo and colonial Korea. These are themes which I have begun exploring tentatively in a new journal publication entitled ‘ ‘Owen Lattimore and Research on the Sino-Korean Borderlands, 1931-1945‘ (European Journal of … Continue reading Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the Fascist Period

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Korean War

Documenting Coastal Night Raids of North Korea, October 1950

Among the unique sources for Korean War history available in the United Kingdom, those associated with Labour MP Tom Driberg are particularly intriguing. I first became aware of Driberg as part of an article project entitled ‘British Responses to Korean War Crimes’ (co-authored with Hannah Dawson, forthcoming in English Historical Review, 2019). Initially, Driberg appeared as a voice of conscience in the House of Commons calling … Continue reading Documenting Coastal Night Raids of North Korea, October 1950

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