Lei Duan completed his Ph.D. at Syracuse University with a dissertation entitled "The Prism of Violence: Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1860-1949." He is currently working as a post- doctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) at the University of Michigan and reports the following publication: "Between Social Control and Popular Power: The Circulation of Private Guns and Control Policies during the mid to late Qing, 1781-1911," American Journal of Chinese Studies 25 (November 2017), 121-40.

Kristin Mulready-Stone's chapter, "'Character Conservancy in Shanghai's Emergency': The YMCA in Shanghai, 1931-1942," was published earlier this year in The YMCA at War: Collaboration and Conflict during the World Wars, edited by Jeffrey Copeland and Yan Xu (London: Lexington Books, 2018).

Wicky Tse has contributed two chapters, namely, "The Latter Han Empire and the End of Antiquity" (pp. 186-201) and "Warfare" (pp. 325-34), in the Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History, edited by Paul R. Goldin (London: Routledge, 2018).

"War and Society in East Asia." In The Routledge Global History of War and Society, edited by David J. Ulbrich and Matthew S. Muehlbauer (London: Routledge, 2018), 1-28.

"Before the Nine-dash Line: Chosŏn Korea in the Grand Strategy of the Ming during the Great East Asian War," presented at "Ten Events from East Asian History that Every IR Scholar Should Know," held at the University of Southern California (May 2018).

Panel chair and discussant, "The Frontiers of Global Military History: Military Technology and Inner and East Asian Warfare," at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History held in Louisville, Kentucky (April 2018).

"The Rhetoric of Catastrophe in the Ming-Qing Transition," also presented at the SMH meeting in Louisville.

Panel chair and discussant, "Art and War: The Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592-1598," at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in Washington, D.C. (March 2018).

"Riverine Warfare in Southwest China during the Ming-Qing Transition," presented at the 3rd Regional Asia-Pacific Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage, held in Hong Kong, China
(December 2017).

Sherman Lai's article "The Evolution of Chinese National Security Debates on Maritime Policy" was published in two parts by the Center for International Maritime Security. Part 1 (August 1, 2017) and Part 2 (August 10, 2017) can be be found at http://cimsec.org/

Hans van de Ven's new book, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, will be published in the US by Harvard University Press in February 2018.

Kenneth Swope is co-editor (with Tonio Andrade) of Early Modern East Asia: War, Commerce & Cultural Exchange: Essays in Honor of John E. Wills, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017). His own contribution, "Rivers of Blood and Roads of Bones: Sichuan in the Ming-Qing Transition," is on pages 34-64 of the volume. Swope's book review of Ji-Young Lee, China's Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination appeared in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 80.3 (October 2017), pages 625-626. He also presented a paper, "Riverine Warfare in Southwest China During the Ming-Qing Transition," at the 3rd Regional Asia-Pacific Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage, held in Hong Kong, China (December 2017).

Ralph D. Sawyer's new book, Lever of Power: Military cDeception in China and the West (ISBN 978-1548245009), was published in September 2017. The book comprehensively examines deception's historical evolution in China and the West, provides extensive translations of relevant military writings from three languages (Chinese, Greek, and Latin), and characterizes the chief measures in terms of method, dynamics, and objective. This book shows that both China and the West have virtually unbroken traditions of innovating deceit and employing deception.

Dr. Xiaobing Li interviewed Ma Ying-jeou, President of the Republic of China (2008-2016), at Taipei, Taiwan, on June 9, 2017, for his new book, History of Taiwan (under contract with ABC-CLIO). He has three books published in 2017: The Cold War in East Asia (Routledge, 2018); Power versus Law in Modern China: Cities, Courts, and the Communist Party, co-author with Qiang Fang (University Press of Kentucky, 2017); and Urbanization and Party Survival in China, co-editor with Xiansheng Tian (Lexington Books, 2017). Li also published three articles in 2017: "How to Train the Dragon: Soviet Advisors and Assistance to the Chinese Navy, 1949-1960," in Naval Advising and Assistance: History, Challenges, and Analysis, edited by Donald Stoker and Michael T. McMaster (West Midlands, UK: Helion, 2017), 220-242; "Triangle of Allies: Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union," in Oklahoma Humanities (Fall/Winter 2017), 28-36; and "Sino-Japanese Maritime Conflicts and Security Concerns in the East China Sea," in Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific: Heritage and Contemporary Challenges, edited by Howard M. Hensel and Amit Gupta (London, UK: Routledge,2017).

Chang Jui-te (Chinese Culture University & Academia Sinica) published his 無聲的要角: 蔣介石的侍從室與戰時中國 [Silent but Significant: The Role of Chiang Kai-shek's Personal Secretariat in Wartime China] (Taipei: Commercial Press, 2017). His 山河動: 抗戰時期國民政府的軍隊戰力 [Shaking the Nation: Fighting Power of the Nationalist Army during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945] was published in 2015 by the Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe in Beijing.

Glenn Griffith, Acquisitions Editor at the Naval Institute Press, recently contracted Kenneth Swope for his future book, Struggle for Empire in 19^th Century China: The True Story of General Zuo Zongtang. The publication date will be 2019 or 2020.

Victoria Tin-bor Hui contributed a chapter, “How Tilly’s Warfare Paradigm Is Revolutionizing the Study of Chinese State-Making,” to the volume edited by Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg, Does War Make States? (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 268-295.