Borderlands… On the Opening of the Ji’an-Manp’o Trade Port 20 Apr 201920 Apr 2019 As a small Chinese city on the Yalu River, Ji'an (集安) is an often-overlooked juncture for Chinese-North Korean movement of supplies and people. It was the main conduit for the…
Borderlands… Memory and Reproduction: A Study of 1980s Chinese Ethnic Korean Revolutionary Narratives—Yun Il-san’s The Roaring Mudan River 15 Jan 201915 Jan 2019 The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies recently published a new and very exciting paper by two Chinese scholars focusing on an area of great interest to me, and hopefully…
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…
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…
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…
China… Revisiting Mao’s Role in the ‘Three-Anti’ Campaign 3 Nov 20163 Nov 2016 If there is one thing that appears certain about contemporary China and Chinese historical studies, it is that Mao's role in sparking and sustaining violence during the period of his…
Borderlands… Comrades in Crisis: Chinese-North Korean Relations in War, Occupation, and Today 10 Mar 201624 Mar 2016 On 25 March 2016, I will present the following paper at Yonsei University in Seoul, thanks to an invitation from John Delury and the Yonsei Underwood International College International Studies…
China… The Perils of Reporting on North Korean Workers in China 12 Jun 201513 Jun 2015 On the last day of the wondrous month of May, Brice Pedroletti, the Le Monde correspondent in China, was in the city of Tumen, along the northernmost point of the…
Borderlands… Bubble at the Summit: Insecurities in Kim Jong-un Itineraries 23 Apr 2015 Is Kim Jong-un staggeringly confident, or do his behaviours and travel itineraries betray personal neuroses and structural fears? The short answer is that it depends on the issue under discussion. Let's…
history and memory… Pu Yi as Witness 12 Apr 201512 Apr 2015 In his 1946 testimony at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Trials), Pu Yi, the former Emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, proved to be…
