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…
Cultural Politics… Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and Vietnam in 1965 1 Mar 2022 On 2 June 1965, Mao Zedong arrived in Hangzhou, where he read a journal article which interested him greatly. Entitled “Looking at US Expansion of the Vietnam War from the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Chinese foreign policy… Poking the Wasp Nest: Shen Zhihua’s Controversial Speech on North Korea 15 Jul 201715 Jul 2017 Why should we care about scholars in China, or the complaints they have toward North Korea? Usually, readers take interest in Chinese scholarly debates because something specific and enticing has…
Adam Cathcart 