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Orchestrating Changes on the Multi-Front Electronic Struggle
Decamping from Chengdu, late summer 2012 Recapitulation | After a solid run of 32 months, the academic weblog Sinologistical Violoncellist has reached its logical conclusion. Since beginning in April...
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Algorithms of Revolution and Control in Pyongyang and Guangzhou
An American entrepreneur arrives at the doorstep of a system that clearly sees digitization as a tool of social control. North Korea is, as one wise man howled from the back of a long socialist queue,...
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“Spit at the American Gentlemen” : North Korean State Media Rolls Out the...
A short article released on January 10 in Pyongyang was fairly enervating, though no news media outlet seems to have picked it up yet. Nor, as Daniel Pinkston has pointed out already, has any Western...
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String Repertoire and Cultural Diplomacy in Northeast Asia
My latest column for The Daily NK delves into these questions, with reference to the New York Philharmonic’s visit to Pyongyang in 2008 and notions of cultural openness today.
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New Publication Up: China Policy Institute Blog (Nottingham)
My new essay focusing on Wu Dawei’s diplomacy in North Korea, entitled “Tuning Out Beijing’s Six-Party Drumbeat,” was posted today at the CPI blog.
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String Crossings: Tracking the Evolution of North Korea’s Moranbong Band
One of the advantages of staying at the top North Korean hotel in Shenyang, the Chilbosan, is that the nightly broadcasts from Pyongyang are available in real time. Earlier this month, I made a visit...
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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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Keeping China in Check: How North Korea Manages its Relationship with a...
On the 24-hour train from Pyongyang to Peking; “Le retour à Pékin se fait en train. Un voyage de 24h auquel participe également un militaire nord-coréen.” Photo A. de la Grange, via Le Figaro The...
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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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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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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 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 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...
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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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