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Revisiting Mao’s Role in the ‘Three-Anti’ Campaign
If there is one thing that appears certain about contemporary China and Chinese historical studies, it is that Mao’s role in sparking and sustaining violence during the period of his rule (1949-1976)...
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Border Consolidation in Liaoning: From Chen Yun to Xi Jinping
For presentation at Leiden University lecture series “Borders: Life on the Edge of Area Studies“, 28 February 2017: For the Chinese Communist Party, the northeastern province of Liaoning today inhabits...
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Recent Op-eds and Media Work
The last three weeks have been particularly intense for analysts of North Korea, China, and Sino-North Korean relations. Amid the struggle to get two of my normal scholarly research articles submitted,...
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Reflections on the History of Chinese-North Korean Relations, and US-DPRK...
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 — usually adding up to...
View ArticleNotes on the Sino-North Korean War of Words
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 approach toward US-North...
View ArticleWalls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951
The rise and ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war, and Mao’s galvanizing intervention into the Korean War, was accompanied and supported by a wave of cultural...
View ArticleThunderclouds 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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