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…
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…
American Foreign Policy… On Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki 17 Jul 201818 Jul 2018 The Trump administration has brought with it a dark winter of discontent to US think tanks. Institutions stocked with the analytical rosters of former Clinton and Obama appointees with North Korea-related expertise…
Cultural Politics… Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives 30 Mar 20186 Apr 2018 A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on…
Art… Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War 19 Mar 201819 Mar 2018 I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a "cognate field" during my doctoral studies…
Art… Resources on North Korean Music Diplomacy 21 Jan 201821 Jan 2018 One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this…
Beijing… Notes on the Sino-North Korean War of Words 26 Sep 20177 Jul 2021 Just because the US President has thrown up a number of smokescreens and signs of real mania of late does not mean writers must "resist" by reflexively taking an analytical…
China… Joshua’s Map: Beijing’s Coverage of North Korean Defector Issues and Human Rights 23 Aug 201720 Aug 2017 In January/February 2015, the Huanqiu Shibao (the foreign affairs tabloid under Beijing People's Daily, massive readership etc.) used one of Joshua Stanton's maps to indicate the locations of North Korea's largest…
Chinese communist party… Youth Work and Class Education under Kim Jong-un 20 Oct 2016 The following is my original intro to a piece I just published in Seoul after some substantial carving down. In other words, the intro was cut, but I think it still stands…
Adam Cathcart 