Borderlands… New Koguryo Research in Pyongyang, or, How to Revive a Historical Dispute on China’s National Day 3 Oct 2014 It doesn't take much skill at reading tea-leaves in Chinese or English to recognize that Kim Jong-un's letter of congratulations to Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, and Zhang Dejiang on the…
Cultural Politics… Inter-Korean Sports Diplomacy: Comment in the Washington Post 7 Jul 20148 Jul 2014 Adam Taylor runs a key foreign affairs blog for the Washington Post. Today he was kind enough to ask for my views on this story of his about North Korea…
East Asian modernity… Pan-Asianism and the Japanese Wartime Empire 9 Jun 201412 Mar 2016 This past spring, upon the invitation of Peter Anderson, I gave a lecture to all of the first-year History students at Leeds University on the following topic, as part of…
China… Chongqing Hothouse: At Rana Mitter’s Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast 30 May 201428 Aug 2015 Rana Mitter, a major historian of early 20th-century China, is currently in Belfast delivering a series of lectures (which I am attending and commenting on) on the history of Chongqing…
Borderlands… New Daily NK Essay: On the Emerging Reality of High-Speed Rail in Eastern Jilin 30 Apr 2014 Eastern Manchuria, for decades a cold and industrially declining region, is now a site of huge infrastructure development. Time and space between the three northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and…
China… Cold War Analysis of Chinese History 14 Oct 2012 Includes interviews with Pearl S. Buck and Theodore White, plenty of Orientalism (the music score is a treatise itself in stereotypes and aural affects) and such gems as describing Shanxi…
Chinese communist party… Yalu River Notes: On Dandong 25 Dec 2011 The following is a cross-post from SinoNK.com. And King Tubby (a regular commenter on both this site and David Bandurski's essential China Media Project) points out a new Los Angeles…
East Asian modernity Montage: Climate Change in China, Cold War Northeast Asia, and Occupy Seattle 20 Nov 201120 Nov 2011 Long and uninterrupted arcs of time being so few, why not describe ways in which readers might garner more than two hours of potential edification? 1. U.S.-China Cooperation vs. Climate…
Chinese communist party… Republican Reading for the Day 10 Oct 20117 Nov 2011 ...is on YouTube. And the online essays on the meaning of the 100th anniversary (today!) of the Chinese republic by Jottings from the Granite [or was it 'Gangster'?] Studio and…
China… Celebrating the National Day Holiday Week in the PRC 3 Oct 2011 Just when you think that China has completely exhausted its capacity to surprise you, the hard-line foreign policy tabloid Huanqiu Shibao sends a reporter to cover an S & M-themed…