Historian
A set of letters sent to and from Owen Lattimore depict a failed effort to jump start Xinjiang studies in the United States after the Chinese revolution. Continue reading Preparing for After the Revolution: Owen Lattimore and Xinjiang Studies in the United States, 1950-1951
I visited the Longjing Municipal Archives and learned the hard way that “open” doesn’t always mean what one would expect in a Chinese archive. Continue reading The Increasing Irrelevance of 开放: Tales from Longjing
Tumen has historically played an important role as a Chinese gateway into North Korea. But is it open for research? Continue reading Surprise, Surprise, Tumen Municipal Archives
I visited the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture Archives in a fruitless effort to track down some documents. Continue reading See You Again, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture Archives
Reproducability is critical to the historical method and the scholarly enterprise, but what happens when the archival documents you draw on suddenly disappear? Continue reading Dealing with Re-classified Documents in China
In May 2015, the Wilson Center launched the Chinese Foreign Policy Database, which I developed. The Database contains nearly 1,500 declassified documents on the international relations of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. Continue reading Chinese Foreign Policy Database
A new collection of Soviet documents now available on the Wilson Center Digital Archive promises to invigorate the study of Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s. Continue reading China and the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, 1934-1949
