Chinese foreign policy… Reading the Room in Tokyo: Taiwan, Japanese Parliamentarians, and the Truss Speech 20 Feb 2023 Former Prime Minister Liz Truss made an intervention in the UK foreign policy discourse with a speech focusing on China, delivered this past Friday in Tokyo. The full text of…
American Foreign Policy… George H.W. Bush in Mao’s China 1 Dec 20181 Dec 2018 With the death of George H.W. Bush, it is an opportune time to look back at his time as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing in the immediate aftermath…
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…
EU-East Asia relations… Documents on Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to the United Kingdom in 1921 29 Jan 201830 Jan 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMGmi7GLro0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UPAoI20Pt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBeElh81rBQ Historian Herbert Bix describes Hirohito's long voyage to the United Kingdom in 1921 as a number of things: it was a test of the court and the…
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…
Art… The Moranbong Band and Regime Consolidation in the DPRK 9 Dec 20159 Dec 2015 Today, media in Beijing announced that the Moranbong Band, the all-female ensemble associated closely with Kim Jong-un, will be travelling to China for five days of performances. An academic paper…
China… Chinese Journalists and the U.S. Occupation of Japan 5 Apr 20156 Apr 2015 At the conclusion of eight years of Japanese occupation of nearly every major city in the Republic of China, Chinese journalists were prepared not just to celebrate victory but to…
Borderlands… New Koguryo Research in Pyongyang, or, How to Revive a Historical Dispute on China’s National Day 3 Oct 2014 It doesn't take much skill at reading tea-leaves in Chinese or English to recognize that Kim Jong-un's letter of congratulations to Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, and Zhang Dejiang on the…
North Korea… On the Inoki Visit to North Korea 4 Sep 2014 Given the amount of public interest in the just-concluded visit of Japanese and American wrestlers to Pyongyang, led by lawmaker (and former wrestling star) Kanji Inoki, I thought I might…
Adam Cathcart 