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…
American Foreign Policy… New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the Korean War 30 Mar 201830 Mar 2018 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…
Korean War Documenting Coastal Night Raids of North Korea, October 1950 20 Feb 201821 Feb 2018 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…
Cold War History… Weaponizing the Past, or, How to Get a Book Contract in Trump’s America 14 Oct 2017 It seems a bit too easy these days to begin any essay with a nod to how disturbed one is by the latest muddy geyser of Presidential discourse. As most…
Borderlands… Questioned Liberators: Guerrilla, Mobile, and Base Warfare in Communist Military Operations in Manchuria, 1945-1947 11 Oct 201711 Oct 2017 The years from 1945-1947 were a complex transitional period in the development of Chinese Communist military, political, and diplomatic strategy. While not yet facing the dilemmas of transforming wholesale an…
Kim Jong-un… Right of Reply: Kim Jong-un’s Rejoinder to American Threats at the UN General Assembly 22 Sep 2017 I imagine that most people did not expect Kim Jong-un to make a direct statement to President Trump -- I certainly didn't. But the North Korean leader has done so,…
history and memory… Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources 1 Jun 201716 Jul 2018 In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the…
Borderlands… Border Consolidation in Liaoning: From Chen Yun to Xi Jinping 6 Feb 2017 For presentation at Leiden University lecture series "Borders: Life on the Edge of Area Studies", 28 February 2017: For the Chinese Communist Party, the northeastern province of Liaoning today inhabits…
American Foreign Policy… Recent Histories of (Local) Violence in the Korean War 17 Oct 201617 Oct 2016 Today I received a stunning new text: Su-kyoung Hwang's monograph Korea's Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A link to the publisher's description of the book is here. Dr.…
Kim Jong-un… North Korea, Opposition Politics, and British Nuclear Deterrence 26 Jul 201626 Jul 2016 I wrote the following piece for The Guardian, the stalwart newspaper for whose North Korea Network I have done a handful of essays and events over the past couple of…
