China… New Writing on the PRC’s Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries 25 Oct 2022 As Xi Jinping confirms his position as China's disciplinarian helmsman, we return to a regular theme of this blog: the early years of the People's Republic of China. Mao's role…
Borderlands… From Liberation to the Great Leap Forward: Ethnic Koreans and Assimilation in Northeast China, 1945-1962 1 Jul 2021 Today I completed a new research article on the broad subject of Maoism's impact on ethnic Koreans in northeast China. The work is slated to appear next year as a…
China… Chinese Strategy and South Korea 1 Sep 202024 Oct 2020 My newest essay, a study commissioned by the National Bureau of Asian Research and introduced and edited by Nadège Rolland, was published on 25 August. The chapter is not paywalled…
Beijing… “The Enemies Made this Possible”: Sino-North Korean Relations after 1948 6 Jun 202023 Dec 2020 “’The Enemies Made This Possible’: Sino-North Korean relations since 1948” with Yujin Lim, in Adrian Buzo, ed., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary North Korea (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 131-140. Abstract: This chapter is…
Chinese communist party… More to Life than Kim Jong-un: Reflections on Robert Collins’ Report on the Organization and Guidance Department 26 Sep 2019 Today the NK News website published a 1600-word essay I wrote in response to Robert Collins' extensive new report on the Organization and Guidance Department of the Korean Workers' Party. A…
Beijing… Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution 12 Jan 201913 Jan 2021 In 1954, an American psychologist travelled to Hong Kong, where he carried out extensive interviews with both Chinese and foreign survivors of captivity, solitary confinement, and torture psychological variety in…
China… Mistranslating Mao in Chengdu, 1958 7 Jan 20191 Jul 2021 [Updated on 1 July 2021] The question of Mao Zedong’s personal role in triggering massive famine in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) brings us into an important debate.…
Beijing… New Fragments from Mao in the Cultural Revolution 10 Dec 2018 In December 2013, scholars of the history of the PRC were given a shot in the arm via the publication of Mao Zedong Nianpu, 1949-1976, consisting of six volumes of previously obscure…
Chinese communist party… Thunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit 18 May 2018 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…
Art… Walls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951 13 Apr 2018 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…