Beijing… Media Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit 30 Mar 2018 Among the dozens of subplots feeding into and out of the curious-but-necessary welcome by Xi Jinping of Kim Jong-un this week is the question of information access and what it…
American Foreign Policy… Reflections on the History of Chinese-North Korean Relations, and US-DPRK Relations Today 12 Mar 201712 Mar 2017 Sometimes we need to modify the questions we ask. The question "Is the Chinese Communist Party going to cut off North Korea?" results in a fairly predictable string of analyses…
Beijing… Bypassing Beijing? North Korean Foreign Relations in April and May 22 Apr 2016 Responding with appropriately prepared shock to the 15 April rocket launch, assessing the crescendo to the big Party Congress in early May in Pyongyang, adding to the noise over the…
Sino-North Korean relations Meth, Road-Tripping, Drought, Aid, and Forbidden Love: Five North Korea Stories from China 24 Jun 2015 Microblogging in English or Chinese continues to present limits on and challenges for academics who 'watch' Northeast Asia. Certainly, in the process of gathering information about the region, it has gotten…
Kim Jong-un… On Kim Jong-un’s ‘Achievements’ and the North Korean-Chinese Relationship 17 Jun 201517 Jun 2015 This past December, many observers of the scene in northeast Asia had questions about the 'three-year mourning period' which was coming to an end, ostensibly, in North Korea. Since Kim…
China… Data Points from a Summer of Ambivalence in Chinese-North Korean Relations 12 Jun 2015 As summer gets underway in earnest, China's new Ambassador to North Korea is getting to work in Pyongyang and surrounding points. While Chinese academics fulminate at the lack of coordination offered by…
Borderlands… Fireworks from the Bunker: North Korea’s Role in Borderless Tourist Zone Revealed 5 Mar 2015 Everything about this Reuters piece about a possible breakthrough in Chinese-North Korean cross-border tourism is great, until: "The [tri-national] zone is the latest push by North Korea to transform itself…
Kim Jong-un… Rounding Up the Roundups of Kim Jong-un’s First Three Years in Power 1 Jan 20151 Jan 2015
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…
Sino-North Korean relations… Keeping China in Check: How North Korea Manages its Relationship with a Superpower 1 Aug 2014 The following essay was published at the China Policy Institute blog, University of Nottingham, on 28 July 2014 (link). Around the world today, knowing how and when to deflect the…
Adam Cathcart 