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Celebrating the National Day Holiday Week in the PRC
Just when you think that China has completely exhausted its capacity to surprise you, the hard-line foreign policy tabloid Huanqiu Shibao sends a reporter to cover an S & M-themed show at an...
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Republican Reading for the Day
…is on YouTube. And the online essays on the meaning of the 100th anniversary (today!) of the Chinese republic by Jottings from the Granite [or was it ‘Gangster’?] Studio and the reliably reactionary...
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Montage: Climate Change in China, Cold War Northeast Asia, and Occupy Seattle
Long and uninterrupted arcs of time being so few, why not describe ways in which readers might garner more than two hours of potential edification? 1. U.S.-China Cooperation vs. Climate Change // As...
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Yalu River Notes: On Dandong
North Korea's Hong Kong? Perhaps. Image courtesy Shijie Zhishi, linked well below. An empty optics firm looms on the horizon on the dirt-torn and perpetually expanding fringes of Xinchengqu, the new...
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Cold War Analysis of Chinese History
Includes interviews with Pearl S. Buck and Theodore White, plenty of Orientalism (the music score is a treatise itself in stereotypes and aural affects) and such gems as describing Shanxi warlord Yan...
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New Daily NK Essay: On the Emerging Reality of High-Speed Rail in Eastern Jilin
Eastern Manchuria, for decades a cold and industrially declining region, is now a site of huge infrastructure development. Time and space between the three northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin,...
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Chongqing Hothouse: At Rana Mitter’s Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University,...
Rana Mitter, a major historian of early 20th-century China, is currently in Belfast delivering a series of lectures (which I am attending and commenting on) on the history of Chongqing during the “War...
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Pan-Asianism and the Japanese Wartime Empire
This past spring, upon the invitation of Peter Anderson, I gave a lecture to all of the first-year History students at Leeds University on the following topic, as part of a module on world history....
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Inter-Korean Sports Diplomacy: Comment in the Washington Post
A North Korean tug-o-war in Pyongyang for May Day, 2014. Image via Chosun Central TV. Adam Taylor runs a key foreign affairs blog for the Washington Post. Today he was kind enough to ask for my views...
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New Koguryo Research in Pyongyang, or, How to Revive a Historical Dispute on...
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 PRC’s National Day...
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