Thunderclouds Over the Honeymoon: Xi, Kim, and the Trump Summit
Amid the welter of diplomatic moves that have occurred in and around the Korean peninsula in 2018, the two meetings in quick succession between the North Korean leader and China’s...
View ArticleNew Fragments from Mao in the Cultural Revolution
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 materials from the...
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Mistranslating Mao in Chengdu, 1958
If you’re thinking much these days about Mao Zedong’s role in triggering massive famine in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61), you aren’t alone. In recent years, big histories in English...
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Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, and the Chinese Cultural...
In his seminal 1961 study of survivors of detention and interrogation in the new People’s Republic of China, Robert Jay Lifton explains why this topic gripped him so thoroughly: …I arrived in Hong...
View ArticleMore to Life than Kim Jong-un: Reflections on Robert Collins’ Report on the...
Today the NK News website published a 1600-word essay I wrote in response to Robert Collins’ extensive new report on the Organization and Guidance Department of the Korean Workers’ Party. A short...
View Article“The Enemies Made this Possible”: Sino-North Korean Relations after 1948
Adrian Buzo will be publishing a large Routledge Handbook on North Korea (which I believe is slated to be published in 2021) and asked me to contribute a chapter. I asked my PhD student Yujin Lim to...
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Chinese Strategy and South Korea
My newest essay, a study commissioned by the National Bureau of Asian Research and introduced and edited by Nadège Rolland, was published on 25 August. The chapter is not paywalled, and resides within...
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From Liberation to the Great Leap Forward: Ethnic Koreans and Assimilation in...
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 chapter in a volume on...
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New Writing on the PRC’s Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
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 in the “Three-Anti,...
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Chinese Architects and Cold War Defections: Notes from the JFK Files
In December 2022, the United States government released over 13,000 documents categorized as JFK Assassination Records. A handful of these records deal with China in some fashion, including US...
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