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Ideology and Anti-Factionalism: A Survey of North Korean Workers’ Party...
In May 2010, the US Central Intelligence Agency released a file which it had had in its files for many decades: Korean Books (in Korean), No. 1, Catalogue of Books by Korean Worker’s Party Publishing...
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Comment on the Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan
Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo Bureau Chief for The Times (London), kindly alerted me to an open letter recently published by a large number of academics nicely timed to follow on the heels of the various...
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Collaborative Research and the New North Korean Social History
The writing of North Korean history is a difficult, exciting, contested, and increasingly social endeavour. Research networks and sharing of sources of ideas are more important than ever. Charles...
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Notes on the Sinchon Massacre
The death of North Korean civilians at Sinchon is significant on a few levels. On the one hand, it calls our attention to the always fractious topic of war crimes in Korea, and the contested nature of...
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Last Call for Abe Shinzo Congressional Speech Op-eds
The Stimson Center’s Yuki Tatsumi threw down the gauntlet in The Diplomat on May 7 in a piece pointedly entitled ‘Stop Obsessing over Abe’s Congressional Speech.’ The conclusion read as follows:...
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Unrest in the Southwest: The Linshui Protests in Historical Perspective
Unrest in the Southwest: The Linshui Protests in Historical Perspective by Adam Cathcart and Li Wankun, University of Leeds for University of Nottingham China Policy Institute Blog Due to the outbreak...
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Full Comment on Women Across the DMZ March
As observers of current events on the Korean peninsula will be aware, a group of peace activists is presently in North Korea and will be crossing the DMZ tomorrow, from Kaesong, into the South. Their...
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On Memorial Day, and Korea
One day in May back in the 1990s, an old man stood about ten meters from a small flag on my father’s grave in Minnesota and gave a speech about Korea, the ‘forgotten war.’ For me, the war hadn’t been...
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On the PRC Ambassador in Pyongyang, ‘Comfort Women’ Activists, and the Women...
This morning I turned on my computer and immediately became wrapped up in a somewhat quixotic quest to find the origins of a rumor. The rumor being that the Chinese Ambassador in Pyongyang ‘had yet to...
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The WIDF and the Debate over Korean War Crimes
In a recent essay for Japan Focus, Rutgers University historian Suzy Kim includes a retrospective on the Women’s International Democratic Federation’s 1951 report from North Korea and that...
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Report on Opium in China from the German Embassy in Tokyo, 1944
On June 8, 1944, the German Embassy in Tokyo sent a report back to the Auswärtiges Amt, or Foreign Ministry. Unlike so many other files dealing with foreign affairs, at this particular dispatch showed...
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Grain Politics and Sichuan in the 1950s
There are few lines of historical investigation more fraught in China than those concerned with food, security, and famine in Sichuan province in the 1950s. But where to start the investigation? Which...
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Wartime History and Beijing’s Response to the New Defence Minister in Tokyo
In the wake of the Upper House elections in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has completed a reshuffling of his cabinet. As described by Japan hand Michael Cucek, it was not a particularly inspiring...
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Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources
In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the DPRK. The...
View ArticleWeaponizing the Past, or, How to Get a Book Contract in Trump’s America
It seems a bit too easy these days to begin any essay with a nod to how disturbed one is by the latest muddy geyser of Presidential discourse. As most sentient beings on the planet today could tell...
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Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War
I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a “cognate field” during my doctoral studies at Ohio University, and with...
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 ArticleMemory and Reproduction: A Study of 1980s Chinese Ethnic Korean Revolutionary...
The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies recently published a new and very exciting paper by two Chinese scholars focusing on an area of great interest to me, and hopefully to readers of this blog:...
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