Walls 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 ArticleGeorge H.W. Bush in Mao’s China
With the death of George H.W. Bush, it is an opportune time to look back at his time as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing in the immediate aftermath of Nixon’s 1972 groundbreaking visit to China....
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 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 (full text here),...
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Surveying the Job Market for Chinese History PhDs, 2018-2021
Out of curiosity and as a service to my own PhD students, I did a review of some recent university job searches in the field of East Asian history, and thought it might be worth sharing more broadly....
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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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