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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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Reading North Korea’s Explosive Critique of ‘Opposite Number’
Channel 4 HQ in London, image via Wikimedia Commons While some sections of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry and various Friendship associations were in middle of a major operation to woo foreign...
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Some North Korea Commentary
My comments about North Korean foreign policy were carried in the last couple of days in The Diplomat and the Wall Street Journal‘s “Korea Real Time” blog. The interview at the former outlet is the...
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Kulturarbeit in Nordkorea
My new essay on matters of classical music in Pyongyang has been posted at Sino-NK: To make a sweeping cultural generalization, German musicians tend to bring great seriousness and historical...
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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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What does Kim Jong-un think of ‘The Interview’? Ask the NDC
Kim Jong-un is the head of the National Defence Commission (NDC), which is functionally the top organ of state power in North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). While no small debate...
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Contentious Politics on the Korean Peninsula: Workshop at the University of...
In 2013-14, I was awarded a research grant by the Academy of Korean Studies for which I was the principle investigator, and was joined by two colleagues from the Sino-NK research cluster. Having...
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Atrocities, Insults, and “Jeep Girls”: Depictions of the U.S. Military in...
Controversy continues to surround various military occupations in East Asia in the 20th century. Specifically, the connection between military occupation and sex work carried out by women the occupied...
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Opera North and ‘The Flying Dutchman’: A Review
While having ostensibly little to do with the East Asian themes that normally permeate this website, the following post is connected to my interest in German classical music and specifically opera....
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On the ‘Cairo Declaration’ Fiasco
While the tendency of the CCP to insert itself at the main junctures of Chinese history in the 20th century is anything but new, there has been an increasing alignment with the earlier Republic of...
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The “Ground Zero Mosque”: The View from China
This op-ed was written in August 2010 as a submission for the New York Times but never published. Things have changed quite a lot in the intervening five years, but perhaps the reading of the Chinese...
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The Moranbong Band and Regime Consolidation in the DPRK
Today, media in Beijing announced that the Moranbong Band, the all-female ensemble associated closely with Kim Jong-un, will be travelling to China for five days of performances. An academic paper I...
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Journalist Expulsions and Beijing’s Counterterrorism Narrative
2015 was supposedly a triumphant year for the Chinese Communist Party, but the CCP seemed determined to end the year on a landslide of insecurity with respect to the foreign journalists within its...
View ArticleNorth 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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