For whatever reason, July has been a particularly active month in the various cockpits where I do my work — coffee shops, trains rocketing between Leeds and London, my university office, and British libraries — and consequently a few things have actually gotten finished. Some of the work that follows is purely opportunistic, but at least a portion of it reflects more deeply on my … Continue reading Writings and Media Work: July 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 been translated into English implying that a Beijing policy shift toward North Korea may be in the offing. Shen Zhihua’s March 2017 speech in Dalian became the latest in this periodic series of subterranean … Continue reading Poking the Wasp Nest: Shen Zhihua’s Controversial Speech on North Korea
Entitled ‘Unraveling China-North Korea Relations,’ this 2000-word essay delves into recent bilateral implications of events in Dandong and Tumen, and argues that taking a broader geographical area into account helps us create a more holistic picture of the relationship. Continue reading New Essay in The Diplomat
Tian Wuxiong, a Ph.D. candidate in modern history at Peking University, has produced a nicely nuanced view of the withdrawal of the Chinese People’s Volunteers from the North. Tian has a good grasp of the Chinese historiography and produced a paper, entitled “Different Intentions with One Voice: The Making of Chinese Troops’ Withdrawal Package from the DPRK in 1958 / 同声异汽：中国1958年从朝鲜全部退军方案的形成” published by Harvard Working Paper series. … Continue reading Reading and Writing Chinese-North Korean Cold War History
The arbitrarily configured 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party, and the presence of a high-level Chinese delegation in Pyongyang, created a need for some commentary and context. This post aggregates some of things I did in response to the event, and in the two months since the “August DMZ loudspeaker crisis” earlier this year. On October 10, I was quoted in the Washington Post, … Continue reading Recent Work on Sino-North Korean Relations, History, and Chinese Foreign Policy
After months of public relations flirtation that led the world to believe that Kim Jong-un would be taking his first foreign trip as head of state to Moscow this month, North Korea has abruptly cancelled the voyage, according to a Russian diplomatic source. The news comes on the heels of South Korean intelligence reports of yet more purges in the upper echelons of the north, … Continue reading Kim Jong-un: purges, paranoia, plots and the cancelled trip to Moscow
On 14 November, I will be delivering the following paper at the SOAS Centre for Korean Studies as part of their seminar series. Succession Politics and Commemorative Culture in North Korea Abstract: In the Kim Jong-un era (December 2011-present), the North Korean state has made a series of moves to further augment and consolidate the ideological foundations of Kimism. Rather than using the emergence of … Continue reading Succession Politics and Commemorative Culture in North Korea: Seminar Paper at SOAS
