North Korea as Cinematic Enemy: Donald Trump and ‘Olympus has Fallen’
I’m a historian of contemporary Northeast Asia, which means that narratives having to do with the Cold War or with peace and war in the region today interest me, even when they’re awful. In 2013, I...
View ArticleResources on North Korean Music Diplomacy
One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this topic generally does a few...
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Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the...
This is the first in a multi-post project on German geographers and intellectuals and their interaction with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, with a nominal focus on Manchuria and the border region...
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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 ArticleNotes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives
A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on this issue...
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...
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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...
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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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Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, and Vietnam in 1965
On 2 June 1965, Mao Zedong arrived in Hangzhou, where he read a journal article which interested him greatly. Entitled “Looking at US Expansion of the Vietnam War from the Perspective of the US Ruling...
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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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