Talking DPRK Art in the Nikkei Asian Weekly…
Posted: June 15th, 2020 | No Comments »Myself and some others talking North Korean art in the Nikkei Asian Weekly….click here…
Real Dictators Podcast – Kim Jong-il
Posted: June 14th, 2020 | No Comments »The people at Noiser podcasts have out together a Real Dictators podcast which includes both Mao and Kimx3 in the DPRK – apparently i’m in there talking North Korea. Available at Apple podcasts, Spotify and the million other places people download podcasts now…
WildChina Book Club – Murders of Old China – 18/6/20
Posted: June 12th, 2020 | No Comments »Next Thursday (18/6/20) I’ll be talking with Mei Zhang of WildChina about my Audible Original Murders of Old China – 12 murders, 12 reinvestigations…all welcome….
In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia
Posted: June 11th, 2020 | No Comments »In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan’s surrender did not mean that the Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes which for over a decade dominated vast populations melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis’s volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for ‘traitors’ in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire’s end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan’s posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections.
Whampoa and the Canton Trade: Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700 – 1842
Posted: June 10th, 2020 | No Comments »Paul A. Van Dyke’s new book, Whampoa and the Canton Trade: Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700 – 1842, authoritatively corrects misconceptions about how the Qing government treated foreigners when it controlled all trade in the Guangzhou port. Van Dyke reappraises the role of Whampoa in the system – a port twenty kilometres away from Guangzhou – and reassesses the government’s attitude towards foreigners, which was much more accommodating than previous research suggested. In fact, Van Dyke shows that foreigners were not bound by local laws and were given freedom of movement around Whampoa and Canton to the extent that they were treated with leniency even when found in off-limit places. Whampoa and the Canton Trade recounts the lives of seamen who travelled half-way around the globe at great risk and lived through a historic period that would become the framework for subsequent encounters between China and the rest of the world. Were it not for the exchanges between the major powers and the Qing empire, the world – as we know it – would be a rather different place. Hence, Van Dyke’s command of data mining shows that Whampoa was a key pillar in the Canton System and, thus, in the making of the modern world economy.
The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier
Posted: June 9th, 2020 | No Comments »In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People’s Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party’s goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state- building, but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining volunatarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.
Strangers on the Praia in That’s Shanghai..
Posted: June 8th, 2020 | No Comments »Talking Macao, Jewish refugees and WW2 (& my new short book Strangers in the Praia out imminently) with That’s mags in China…. click here….
City of Devils at the (online) Felixstowe Book Festival 2020 – June 27…
Posted: June 6th, 2020 | No Comments »The Felixstowe Book Festival has had to go online but Old Shanghai & City of Devils is now free to all on Felixstowe’s Facebook page on 27/6/20 – click here to sign up…
