Sino-NK

We’re off to an excellent start in the Kim Jong Un era at SinoNK.com, about six weeks after the site officially launched on December 19, 2011.  Foremost, we are excited about the quality of the analysis and of the team.  Even a cursory glance at the Staff page or our Research page (which, like the immense apartments at Mansudae, is littered with disjointed parts and constantly under construction) hopefully indicate that we have good cause to be bullish.

The purpose of this post is simply to provide a few data points and obligatory hat tips, and also to give readers of the site a sense of who their fellow readers are.  Stephan Haggard (linked below) provided probably the most in-depth (and important) endorsement of the work we are doing here, but other endorsements and links of various have been coming in and, being rather community minded, we wanted to share these as well.  

Above all, we want this site to be useful for you, the readers.  Please let us know what we can do to make that a reality.  — Adam Cathcart (Editor-in-Chief) and Chuck Kraus (Managing Editor), Seattle/Washington, D.C.

Endorsements and Links:
– Stephan Haggard, “Sources: Cathcart and SinoNK.com on Chinese Reactions to Kim Jong Il’s Death,” Witness to Transformation, January 25th, 2012.

– National Committee on North Korea, “Cathcart: China and the North Korean Succession,” January 27th, 2012.

– M. Taylor Fravel, “China-North Korea Dossier,” January 30th, 2012.

– Justrecently, “What’s News on the Chinese / North Korean Border?,” January 19th, 2012.

– Blood and Treasure, “Is there a North Korean resistance?,” January 27th, 2012.

– Bill Bishop, “China Readings for January 31st,” Sinocism, January 31st, 2012.

– Nordkorea-Info, “Spannende Blogs,” January 4, 2012:

Das Ganze ist absolut lesenswert. Allein die umfangreiche Auswertung nordkoreanischer und chinesischer Medien ist glaube ich einzigartig. = The whole thing is completely worth reading; in and of itself, the rich interpretation of North Korean and Chinese media is, I believe, one of a kind.

Publications:
– Adam Cathcart, “I Watched North Korea’s Propaganda Film So You Don’t Have To,” Foreign Policy, January 13th, 2012.

– Nicholas Miller, “Power Behind Kim Jong-Un?,” The Diplomat, January 17th, 2012.

Presentations:
– Adam Cathcart, “Sino-North Korean Relations and Borderlands, 1945-1947,” King’s College, University of London, January 13, 2012.

– Adam Cathcart, “Surveying the North Korean Border,” The Bookworm, Chengdu, December 15, 2011.

– Charles Kraus, “Brotherhood of Scars: Chinese-Korean Relations during Wartime, 1945-1953,” Graduate Student Conference on Asian Affairs, Columbia University, February 10th, 2012.

– Charles Kraus, “Mutual Dependency in Sino-North Korean Relations: Evidence from the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War,” SAIS Asia Conference, April 6, 2012.

Tweets, Re-tweets, and Endorsements by Journalists: Louisa Lim (NPR), Malcom Moore (Daily Telegraph), Isaac Stone Fish (Foreign Policy), Blake Hounshell (Foreign Policy), Francois Bougon (Le Monde), Richard Horgan (Liberate Laura), Cynthia Yoo (Nanoomi.net), Christopher Green (Daily NK)  // by Scholars and Analysts: Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt (International Crisis Group, Beijing), Nicholas Hamisevicz (Korea Economics Institute), Jerker Hellstrom (Swedish Defence Research Agency), John Delury (Yonsei University); Andrew Small (Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.); Korean Peninsula Affairs Center (Syracuse University); Aidan Foster-Carter (Leeds University).

And while that is all quite nice, it is still rather difficult to approach the work of, well, people like Jonathan Pollack.  Enjoy: