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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
civil war… Stalinist Modes of Violent Power Consolidation 21 Oct 201521 Oct 2015 Last week the student discussions in my "Mao and Modern China" module at Leeds University centred on the old dichotomy between violent coercion and persuasive communication in the early years…
Adam Cathcart 