Issue 6.2 of the Journal of Chinese Military History has recently been published. It includes the following articles:

Wicky W. K. Tse, "Cutting the Enemy's Line of Supply: The Rise of the Tactic and Its Use in Early Chinese Warfare," 131-156.

Adam Chang, "Reappraising Zhang Zhidong: Forgotten Continuities During China's Self-Strengthening, 1884-1901," 157-192.

Teddy Y. H. Sim, "Portuguese Defence Activities at Macau During the Boxer Uprising," 193-218.

It also contains book reviews by Daqing Yang, Peter Lorge, and Jonathan Karam Skaff.

CMHS members may access the journal online by going to the society's Web site (www.cmhsociety.org), logging in there with their previously assigned CMHS username and password, and clicking the journal link in the Members Area. Please note that there is no need to log in again at the Brill Online site. If you have not yet been assigned a username and password or encounter any other problem, please contact David Graff (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for assistance.

Looking for 2-3 Additional Panelists

Proposed Panel Title: Framing Chaos and Devastation in Chinese History

Working Panel Abstract
As the country with perhaps the world’s most extensive and richly documented military history, China witnessed the early emergence of specific vocabularies and discourses pertaining to the devastation, trauma, and chaos caused by warfare. Such discourses were deployed over the centuries to provide a common frame of reference for rulers and policy makers and to detail the evils of warfare and the lapse of governing institution. While certain tropes became recurrent and were probably more symbolic than anything, particularly vivid and frank depictions of warfare, famine, epidemics and the like also emerge in a wide range of materials from the standard dynastic histories to private diaries and memoirs. This panel seeks to compare and contrast accounts of chaos and devastation associated with war throughout Chinese history.

Panelists & Paper Titles
“The Rhetoric of Catastrophe in the Ming-Qing Transition” by Kenneth M. Swope (University of Southern Mississippi)

If you are interested in joining this panel, contact Ken Swope at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 The Chinese Military History Society will hold its 2018 conference in Louisville, Kentucky on Thursday, April 5. The theme of this year's conference is “War, Peace, and the Chinese Landscape,” focusing on how the geography, environment, and spaces of conflict have influenced both the waging of war and the maintenance or restoration of peace. Papers may address any historical period from antiquity to the present. As usual, papers are not required to address the conference theme; proposals on other subjects related to the military history of China and other East Asian countries will be considered as well.

The time and place of the 2018 CMHS conference were chosen to facilitate participants' attendance at the 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Military History (SMH), which will be held at the Galt House Hotel from April 5 to April 8 (with panels beginning on Friday, April 6). Although there is no registration fee for the CMHS meeting, attendance at the SMH conference requires separate registration and payment of applicable fees. For more information about the 2018 SMH conference, please visit .

CMHS conference attendees will be eligible for the SMH rate for hotel rooms provided they register to attend the SMH as well.

If you are interested in presenting at the CMHS conference, please send your name and contact information, a paper abstract of no more than 250 words, and a brief C.V. to David Graff by November 15, 2017.

David A. Graff
Department of History
117 Calvin Hall
802 Mid-Campus Drive South
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-1002
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tel: 785-532-6730

Interested non-presenters, especially scholars attending the SMH conference, are also welcome to attend the CMHS conference.

Albert Galvany reports the publication of his article “The Court as a Battlefield: The Art of War and the Art of Politics in the Han Feizi,” in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 80.1 (2017): 73-96.