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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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Williams and Wu, The Great Wall of Confinement: A Review
Beijing’s pride in having hosted the 2008 Olympics and China’s protean economic growth contain a dark underside—unemployment, crime, corruption, and prison camps. Prison camps, or laogai, are the...
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Data Points from a Summer of Ambivalence in Chinese-North Korean Relations
As summer gets underway in earnest, China’s new Ambassador to North Korea is getting to work in Pyongyang and surrounding points. While Chinese academics fulminate at the lack of coordination offered...
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The Perils of Reporting on North Korean Workers in China
On the last day of the wondrous month of May, Brice Pedroletti, the Le Monde correspondent in China, was in the city of Tumen, along the northernmost point of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea....
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Regional Government and Political Integration in Southwest China, 1949-1954:...
Dorothy J. Solinger: Regional Government and Political Integration in Southwest China, 1949-1954: A Case Study. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Review by Li Wankun, University of Leeds...
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Will China Disintegrate? A British Assessment in 1947
On either side of an energizing North Korea public event I did this past Friday in London, I make two treks out to the UK’s National Archives in Kew Gardens. My goal was explore Foreign Office papers...
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Dandong Discourse: China-DPRK Trade Fair, and Rumblings in Xinchengqu
Historians have surely seen better days between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kim-centric Workers’ Party of [North] Korea, but business continues apace today in the borderland. The main item seen...
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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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Deng Xiaoping as Cultural Conservative
Today is Deng Xiaoping’s birthday. He was born in 1904 in Guang’an, Sichuan, a city now receiving various and not entirely uncontroversial forms of capital as a result. Consequently, I am reminded of...
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Opium and National Humiliation: Another Commemoration
On June 8, 1944, the German Embassy in Tokyo sent a report back to the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry). Unlike so many other files dealing with foreign affairs, at this particular dispatch showed no...
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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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Notes on Teaching the Nixon Visit to China
The Nixon visit was as clear a turning point as will ever arrive in diplomatic history, involving two of the world’s most important nations. The Nixon visit is a prism into talking about what had come...
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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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Writing the Early Postwar: White and Jacoby’s _Thunder Out of China_
Foreign correspondents are crucial conduits for insights into contemporary East Asia. As I’ve learned from my conversations with various bureau chiefs, stringers, and greybeards in the region, there...
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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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Second-Hand Stories: East Asia in the Bill Clinton Autobiography
This essay was written in Seattle on 24 February, 2009; a shorter version was published at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma that spring. This past weekend I took a long walk up Seattle’s Dearborn...
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Revisiting Mao’s Role in the ‘Three-Anti’ Campaign
If there is one thing that appears certain about contemporary China and Chinese historical studies, it is that Mao’s role in sparking and sustaining violence during the period of his rule (1949-1976)...
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Chinese Patterns of Response to North Korean Distasters and Collapse
On 29 September, I presented a paper at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul. In addition to conversations with members of the ROK Foreign Ministry (my hosts), I also had a chance to meet,...
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Britain’s Global Cold War: Publications by Alexander Nicholas Shaw
One of the nice things about my job is that I get to work with some the most talented young historians in the field today. Alexander Shaw is one of those working and publishing in international...
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