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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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Chinese Journalists and the U.S. Occupation of Japan
At the conclusion of eight years of Japanese occupation of nearly every major city in the Republic of China, Chinese journalists were prepared not just to celebrate victory but to join the Allied...
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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...
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...
View ArticleDocuments on Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to the United Kingdom in 1921
Historian Herbert Bix describes Hirohito’s long voyage to the United Kingdom in 1921 as a number of things: it was a test of the court and the conservatives in Tokyo (some factions did not want him to...
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 ArticleOn Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki
The Trump administration has brought with it a dark winter of discontent to US think tanks. Institutions stocked with the analytical rosters of former Clinton and Obama appointees with North...
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....
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Reading the Room in Tokyo: Taiwan, Japanese Parliamentarians, and the Truss...
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss made an intervention in the UK foreign policy discourse with a speech focusing on China, delivered this past Friday in Tokyo. The full text of her speech, along with...
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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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