A great shot from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 movie Rear Window with James Stewart and Grace kelly. Here Kelly reclining in Stewart’s apartment reading William O Douglas’s Beyond the High Himalayas (1952). Douglas An associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and an advocate of civil liberties. From 1950 to 1961, Douglas travelled extensively in the Middle East and Asia. Beyond the High Himalayas was his second book.
This rare picture mailer from Shanghai in 1937 is beautiful, though I don’t have any images from the fold out (if anyone has one I’d love to see?)…dated 6 November 1937 it’s a fold-out booklet of twenty War Pictures of Shanghai/Sino-Japanese War 1937 addressed to London and franked with a 5c Sun Yat Sen stamp.
A nice little item – a Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC) officer’s bi-metal cap badge…the date – 4th April 1854 refers to the Battle of Muddy Flat (click here for more), the first action for the SVC during the Taiping Rebellion fighting alongside regular British and American military units.
A long time ago I blogged about the China-related street names that survive around the West India Dock Road in E14, the East End, stemming of course from the trade destinations – Nankin, Pekin, Canton and there’s an Amoy Place. The other day I happened to be walking around the far more salubrious postcode, W9 (Warwick Avenue/Maida Vale) and noticed a Formsa Road that I’d never noticed before – not so sure of how this one came to be named?
From 1949 to 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China’s periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China’s earliest island-seizing campaigns.
In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China’s naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position.
Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution’s identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China’s recent maritime achievements in proper historical context—and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.
Toshi Yoshihara is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He was previously the John A.van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies at the US Naval War College and coauthored Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy.
My long read on the 1924 assassination attempt by Vietnamese indepndence activists on the then Governor of Indochina visiting Guangzhou’s Shamian Island was in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine (click here to read) – it also got the cover courtesy of some great design by Mario Rivera…
In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong’s government for the next twenty years.
Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release.
Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao’s campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.
My latest long read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine. In 1924, an attempt was made on the life of the French governor of Indochina in Guangzhou. The plot failed, but the bomber’s influence was far-reaching…click here to read….
