Stanford University Press Blog

Zombies in the Archives

Preserving web-based content, including scholarship, presents a host of unique challenges.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

The Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive.

It’s been widely noted that the typical website lasts roughly three to five years. One of the goals of SUP’s Mellon grant is to mitigate that inevitability by exploring a range of preservation approaches for the web-based works we’re publishing. While documentation is a necessary component of archiving digital content, an ideal archive would also offer readers the ability to fully experience the interactive qualities of a digital scholarly work. So I’ve spent the past week learning about what some people are doing to make digital content accessible, even after its three-to-five year countdown has expired.

Just as last week’s blog post on documentation was going live, I was checking in at the 2017 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, a meeting with a heavy focus on web archiving. If documentation offers a way to chronicle the experience of interacting with digital content that is no longer accessible, web archiving seeks to capture a snapshot of a website, even if it’s not quite as interactive as the original. Take, for example, the Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive that crawls websites and records them so that readers can ostensibly visit a version of a webpage as it appeared on a specific date in history. It’s an important resource, especially at a time when information can disappear overnight, as if it never existed.

 

A Wayback Machine capture of whitehouse.gov on October 31, 2016 and the live site as of June 25, 2017.

Food Drive for the Aspiring Attorney

For-profit law schools are likely to remain unchallenged under Trump.

by RIAZ TEJANI

Public domain via Pixabay.

After centuries of exclusion from the legal profession and the justice system, ethnoracial and socioeconomic minorities are now welcome—at a very hefty cost. This was a key lesson I learned from years studying a US for-profit law program. Whereas school proprietors counted on a feast of unconditional federal student loan dollars, students assumed the risk of famine brought by non-dischargeable debt and limited job prospects. Students of one law school even faced literal hunger as their loan checks were temporarily suspended due to their school’s repeatedly poor performance.

For-profit law schools, once unheard of under the strict accreditation monopoly of the American Bar Association (ABA), suddenly became viable after a deregulatory policy shift in the 1990s. Following the lead of large for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, financiers powered by fresh interest in private equity investment created new law schools and branded them with a mission to “serve the underserved,” in other words to cater to minority and working-class communities long excluded from the legal profession and access to justice. Amid renewed, marketized interest in corporate and professional “diversity,” these schools attained ABA accreditation.

Despite accusations of predatory behavior, they could argue that no one else was so actively diversifying the legal community. When more and more students—especially minority graduates—failed to obtain Bar admission or gainful employment upon completion, school principals argued they had enabled market “access” for more minority legal professionals than anyone before.

Whereas school proprietors counted on a feast of unconditional federal student loan dollars, students assumed the risk of famine brought by non-dischargeable debt and limited job prospects.

Unacceptable Persuasion

The nonstop sell in the land of the free.

by MARK BARTHOLOMEW

Facebook reactions. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This May, documents from an internal Facebook report leaked to the press. In the report, Facebook executives boasted of Facebook’s ability to monitor posts and photos in real time to determine what young users are feeling and when. The company claimed that it could identify a host of emotions in its users, including “stressed,” “defeated,” “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” “nervous,” “stupid,” “silly,” “useless,” or feeling like a “failure.” It was implied that such information could be used by eager marketers, for the right price. Facebook initially apologized, admitting that it was wrong to target the emotional susceptibilities of young people. But it quickly backtracked, contending that the report was innocently meant “to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook,” and that the analysis had not been operationalized to actually match ads to teenagers exhibiting these particular frailties.

The ability to accurately target consumers based on their individualized emotional states represents a potential game changer for commercial persuasion.

The leaked report reveals a new front in the longstanding battle between advertisers and consumers. As with many other profitable entities of the new millennium, Facebook’s business model depends on convincing businesses that it offers a new, more effective and efficient means of reaching potential customers. Advertising revenue is the lifeblood that pumps through Facebook’s corporate veins. Advertisers have long tried to capitalize on audience insecurities. Mouthwash and toothpaste makers tell us that our love lives and job prospects hang in the balance if we do not confront the specter of halitosis. Super Bowl ads feature cute babies, triggering concerns about the safety of our children to the benefit of tire makers and life insurance companies. But the ability to accurately target consumers based on their individualized emotional states represents a potential game changer for commercial persuasion.

Adcreep » mounts a damning critique of the modern American legal system's failure to stem the flow of invasive advertising.

Emotional segmenting is just one new strategy employed by advertisers today. Location-tracking technologies shadow shoppers, enabling the delivery of ads at critical moments. A thriving marketplace for celebrity selling on social media leverages the sociality and seeming spontaneity of Twitter and Instagram to camouflage the mercenary motives of brand spokespersons. Meanwhile market research is increasingly turning away from the conscious dialogue of focus group interviews, instead using neuroscience to measure our unconscious, involuntary biological responses to products and advertising.

Emerging tactics of commercial persuasion, from algorithms to consumer surveillance, may yield strong returns for marketers, but they show little respect for human autonomy. This raises the question, how should the law deal with marketing innovations that threaten to upset the balance of power between advertisers and consumers? This is a difficult question, but reformers do not need to start from scratch: A sophisticated legal apparatus already exists to balance commercial freedom with consumer protection. In trying to understand the law’s response to the marketing technologies of today, I examined a century of skirmishes between advertisers, consumers, and legal actors in the United States. These battles over marketing innovation have created a sprawling ecosystem of laws and governmental and private regulators.

Sustainable Design for the Digital Age

Our Digital Production Associate on documenting and preserving born-digital scholarship.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Jasmine Mulliken (right), at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

I spent last week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute on the UVic campus in Victoria, British Columbia. It was one of many DHSIs that are held all over the world each summer. In addition to giving a presentation on SUP’s Archivability Guidelines, one of several guidelines we’ve created to guide our authors toward responsible and sustainable digital development, I had the opportunity to participate in one of twenty-five weeklong intensive seminars offered by some of the leading digital humanists in their fields. Since one of my roles on the Mellon project at SUP is to explore methods of archiving and preserving the born-digital content we’re publishing, I eagerly signed up for Professor Dene Grigar’s course, Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation.

Dene has been a longtime fixture in e-literature circles, and her Pathfinders project serves as an excellent model of the traversal method for documenting digital work that is no longer accessible without specific hardware. Building onto that model, students in her class teamed up to document their own chosen projects, which ranged from a code poem that interactively translates algebra into poetry, to an interactive essay from a larger e-lit fiction, to a music-based app, to a digital kinetic erasure poetry project.

But perhaps one of the most intensive documentations was the one my group worked on together. Over the course of two days, we put together a rich documentation of SUP’s first publication under the Mellon initiative, Enchanting the Desert.

Transformative Activism

In Argentina activism is an ongoing process of working on the self and acting on the world.

by SIAN LAZAR

A demonstration in Argentina organized by the Argentine Central Trade Union (Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina), 2012. Photo by Sian Lazar.

In my home country, the UK, we have just come out of a general election. Many of us—including the prime minister who called it—thought that this election would consolidate Conservative power by creating an unassailable majority in the House of Commons. But, although the Tories won the most votes, they actually lost seats, resulting in a hung parliament. This impasse raises plenty of problems and is hardly the most strong and stable outcome, but we have, at least for now, collectively warded off the specter of a one-party state. And it looks as though that achievement in large part came down to the Labour party running an extremely effective campaign: people taking to the streets and knocking on doors to talk to voters, organizing rallies, meetings, discussions, hustings, social media campaigns, and so on. In other words, good old-fashioned activism. Meanwhile, in the US, people are organizing and attending town hall meetings with their representatives; they are protesting at airports and outside courtrooms; they are taking to the streets in enormous numbers to object to President Trump and his policies. Again, good old-fashioned activism. At the same time, in both countries hundreds of everyday campaigns are taking place: for fair wages, fair policing, environmental protection, reproductive rights, clean water, and the list goes on.

What is it that impels people to take up the role of activist?

But what is it that impels people to take up the role of activist, to spend time seeking to persuade others of their cause and to collectively resist the attacks on social life and reproduction wrought by corporate capital and its allies in government? This question is at the heart of my research. I ask it of labor union activists in Argentina, a group of people who have been highly organized since the turn of the 20th century. Over generations, labor unionism has persisted as a vibrant and powerful movement at the heart of Argentine politics, despite being attacked and threatened, at times with lethal force. That persistence is based on many individuals choosing to become activists and to continue organizing in the face of public stigma and state repression. These days the latter tends to take the form of rubber bullets rather than disappearances and such confrontations occur with less frequency than they used to, but activists’ perseverance remains impressive all the same.

State-Made Elites

An entitlement system from 200 years ago sheds light on inequality in China today.

by SHUANG CHEN

Members of the Eight Banners in an Imperial huntring trip, 17th century. Public domain via Wikipedia.

In 2000, 85 percent of the global wealth was concentrated in the hands of 10 percent of the world’s households, and about 60 percent of households had nearly nothing. China is emblematic of this wealth disparity: As of 2014, the top 1 percent of the Chinese population shared a third of the wealth in the country, despite its formerly socialist system. Thomas Piketty and others have shown how unequal patterns of wealth distribution today have their origins in a time prior to the development of capitalism and the market economy. And while increasing wealth inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, the origins and processes that led to such inequality vary across regions and countries, each instance emerging from particular political and economic systems of individual societies.

While we nowadays pay much attention to the influence of the market economy and capitalism in wealth inequality, a case in nineteenth-century China reveals a type of inequality formed under a state-dominated system. Under such a system, the state controlled material wealth, classified its subjects into distinct categories, and allocated these groups differential entitlements to wealth. The inequality under such a state-dominated system is noteworthy not only because the state’s ability to assign unequal entitlements is remarkable, but also because of the ways people responded to such state initiatives, which, consciously or unconsciously, made this inequality durable. In many ways, this nineteenth-century entitlement system parallels the social stratification of post-1949 China and looking into this historical case can help us reflect on how we typically conceive of continuity, change, and modern phenomena.

While we nowadays pay much attention to the influence of the market economy and capitalism in wealth inequality, a case in nineteenth-century China reveals a type of inequality formed under a state-dominated system.

Meet the Team

Meet the people blazing the trail in publishing born-digital scholarship in its native form.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

Over the two years since we first announced our Mellon-funded initiative to develop a publishing program for born-digital scholarly projects, we have learned and achieved quite a bit. And while we might have been a bit quiet on the blog about our progress during that time, we’ve been busy developing our program and we’re now eager to begin sharing our experiences. As we continue to meet the challenges of pioneering a unique and unrivaled approach to digital publishing, we’ve recognized that what we’re learning can not only benefit other future publishers of digital projects but also those projects’ authors, reviewers, editors, and audiences.

The increasing number of academic authors undertaking the challenges and opportunities of employing digital modes in their scholarship demands that more publishers take on the challenges of adding digital formats, beyond simple epubs, to their existing programs. We hope by highlighting our own experiences in such an exciting endeavor that we can serve as a model for others in the field of scholarly communications and initiate conversations that will advance publishing standards in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. If, as Abby Smith Rumsey has suggested, humanity’s position in technological development makes us “like adolescents in the throes of life’s most awkward age,” we hope that by making transparent our own awkward moments and developmental epiphanies, for better or worse, we can ease the growing pains and establish a support network for publishers and authors creating and publishing digital-only scholarship.

We hope that by making transparent our own awkward moments and developmental epiphanies, for better or worse, we can ease the growing pains and establish a support network for publishers and authors.

Evaluating Activism

Activists would do well to borrow from the tenets of advocacy and policy change evaluation to enhance their efforts.

by ANNETTE L. GARDNER and CLAIRE D. BRINDIS

Images (left to right) from the 2014 New York City Climate March (CC BY-SA 4.0), the 2017 March for Science (CC BY-SA 3.0), and the 2017 Women's March (public domain). 

The 2016 election has embroiled the United States in political upheaval, the likes of which have not been seen in recent times. The politics of inclusion are competing head-on with those of division, and political rancor runs high. Advocacy is now front and center, with much of it being creative and engaging, but not all of it. Considered a critical means for expanding democracy, this broad swath of political actors, whom we call “advocates,” are bringing to bear their influence, using traditional strategies and tactics, such as organizing protests and showing up in force at town hall meetings. However, without thoughtful reflection, advocacy strategies are unlikely to result in the policy mobilization and impact that they intend; those who seek greater social justice will be thwarted in their efforts unless they more fully understand what is effective in mobilizing communities and shaping public and political opinion.

Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation » looks at the concepts, designs, methods, and tools needed to conduct effective advocacy and policy change evaluations.

This is where evaluation comes in. Skilled evaluators have long been at work designing appropriate evaluations to meet diverse needs: increased foundation interest in supporting advocacy and policy change initiatives to achieve systems change; evaluation of democracy-building initiatives worldwide; and diffusion of advocacy capacity beyond the traditional advocacy community. Evaluators have met many of these needs with good success, building a new field of evaluation practice, adapting and creating evaluation concepts and methods, and shaping advocate, funder, and evaluator thinking on advocacy and policy change in all its diverse manifestations. We predict the field will only continue to grow and evolve, and those aiming to effect political change, whether at the grassroots, or institutionally, would do well to borrow from the tenets of advocacy and policy change evaluation to guide and enhance their efforts.

Those seeking to bring about policy change need to be prepared to evaluate a broad range of advocacy strategies and tactics to be effective.

The Everyday Made Literary

How the Romantics turned their—and our—attention to the quotidian.

by WILLIAM GALPERIN

Study from Nature: At Twickenham. Painted by John Linnell, 1806.

One of the most striking moments in Wordsworth’s poetry comes at the very end of his most famous poem, where he speaks cryptically of the “meanest flower that blows” as “giv[ing] / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” This statement has long perplexed readers but there are two aspects that bear particular scrutiny: the frequency of the experience as described and the fact that the flower is demonstrably, extravagantly, ordinary.

There is a third aspect as well—thinking as distinct from feeling—best glossed by recourse to another Wordsworth poem, “The Two April Mornings,” which features an old man’s recollection of an encounter at—of all places—his daughter’s gravesite, which he remembers coming upon by accident only to be distracted by someone who is very much alive:

And turning from her grave I met
Beside the church-yard Yew
A blooming girl, whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew. . . .


There came from me a sigh of pain
Which I could ill confine;
I looked at her and looked again
—And did not wish her mine.

It’s hard to say where feeling stops and thinking begins here, given the pain with which thought is seemingly allied. Still, it’s pretty clear that the girl’s transit from something personal to something impersonal—and in that sense ordinary—is administered by a revision, a double take, where something missed and refashioned is suddenly present and freestanding. The same is true of the meanest flower. By giving rise to thought such as Wordsworth describes it, the flower, like the girl, is casting off a different kind of thought: a poetical or subjective thinking where flowers speak, where the living are stand-ins for the dead, and, as Wordsworth punningly hints earlier in the poem, where a thought can be a natural object rather than the other way around.

The Cultural Pasts of Poland

National myths are written and rewritten through visual and material culture.

by GENEVIÈVE ZUBRZYCKI

Schindler’s Factory Museum in Krakow. Photo by Geneviève Zubrzycki, July 2010.

 

On April 10, 2010, the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, along with his wife and a VIP delegation, were killed in a plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia. The President and dignitaries were on their way to commemorate the Katyń forest massacre of 1940, which claimed the lives of over 20,000 Polish officers who were executed by the Soviet NKVD. In the days and weeks following the tragic crash, mourners paid tribute to President Kaczyński on a monument erected in remembrance of “Katyń.” A political sticker with the President’s photo was glued to the bronze plaque, powerfully juxtaposing the plane crash in Smoleńsk and the Katyń massacre; mourners and political supporters also adorned the monument with a Polish flag, candles, as well red and white flowers (both fresh and plastic).

 

Photo by Geneviève Zubrzycki, May 2011.

 

The official monument prominently showcases the name, “Katyń,” inscribed in metal sticks evoking makeshift wooden grave markings, the “t” featured as a cross. The inscription reads, “in memory of Polish army officers, murdered by Soviet totalitarian communism on the empire of evil’s territory after September 17 1939.” Here, two tragic events were folded into a single martyriological narrative using religious and national iconography as well as official and non-official material mnemonic devices. With the confluence of past and present and the invocation of history and faith, this act of public mourning was also a spontaneous reaffirmation of enduring national scripts and myths.

Making Sense of Love

Much more than a feeling, love explains how we understand our world and each other.

by PAUL A. KOTTMAN

The Fall of Man, 1616. Painted by Hendrick Goltzius.

Over the past generation or so, with astonishing rapidity, widespread social opposition to same-sex marriage has evaporated in many parts of the world. Reliable and effective birth control has become increasingly available to individuals around the globe. Millions of women, in the past century, have gained the ability to safely and legally terminate a pregnancy at will. New reproductive technologies, along with new kinship formations, make the propagation of life and the raising of children seem less and less the result of sexual reproduction.

At the same time, in many places, we are living through one of the most profound social transformations in human history: the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. The tidal waves of political and philosophical feminism, and the critiques to which entrenched institutions of sexual domination are subjected, are being felt throughout society. Behind this lies the expanded social authority of lovemaking and “love-based” commitments, in our laws governing everything from marriage and domestic economic life, to the adoption of children, to our schools and medical practices. Virtually no social, civic or political institution is being left untouched by these vast changes.

The sheer pace of social change often outstrips our explanations for it.

In the face of ongoing violence, naked prejudice, social crisis, regressive politics and institutionalized oppression around the world—much of which arises in response to the developments just mentioned—we may hesitate to trumpet this list of achievements too loudly. Nevertheless, the immense social transformations just mentioned are real and vast.

In Memory of Alan Mintz

Mintz’s commitment to Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing.

Select works of Alan Mintz. Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Last week, the field of Jewish Studies lost an influential scholar whose work leaves a lasting impression on the study of Hebrew literature. Alan Mintz passed away on May 20, just a few weeks before the planned publication of his latest book, a major critical study of S.Y. Agnon’s A City in Its Fullness.

We at Stanford University Press were grateful for the opportunity to work with Alan Mintz, whose intellectual commitment to interpreting and advocating for the importance of Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the larger community of Alan’s colleagues, students, friends, and family who will keenly feel his loss.

Here, we share remembrances of Alan from current and former editors of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series who worked with Alan throughout the years.

 

—STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

From the Vote to the Vatican

In the Trump era, the relationship between Catholics and U.S. politics is complicated.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Donald Trump and Pope Francis. Image by DonkeyHotey. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The November election showed a major shift in the Catholic vote: for the first time since 1968, the majority of Catholics did not vote in the same way as the majority of Americans. In 1968, the majority of Catholics voted for Hubert Humphrey, while the majority of the popular vote went, as we know, to Richard Nixon (though Humphrey lost almost 20 percentage points to the Republicans as compared to the 1964 elections). Even in 2000, Catholics voted in the same way as the majority of their fellow citizens: 51% of them chose Al Gore, who was eventually defeated by the Electoral College system. This identity between “Catholic vote” and popular vote has led many observers to state that a “Catholic vote” simply does not exist, or even that “Catholics are the bellwether voters: as go Catholics, so goes the nation.”

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority (55%) for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote (46.1%), a difference of about nine percentage points. This is a noteworthy change, one that signals at least two things: first, that the Catholic hierarchy did not challenge Donald Trump, despite what certain statements made by Pope Francis during the campaign had led people to think; and second, that there is a majority of Catholics in the United States who want to carve their social, and therefore political, advancement in stone. And that these two phenomena influence each other.

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote.

 

In Rome We Trust » reveals how Catholics have come to play an increasingly significant role in American politics.

This thirst for social advancement can be explained in the following way: since the end of the World War II, Catholics have climbed the social ladder, achieving the pre-eminent role in the political life of the country that I describe in my new book, In Rome We Trust. The result is that they now have dreams of overcoming the traditional social hierarchy that identifies America with WASPs. Some of them want to see a “De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite,” as Robert C. Christopher puts it in Crashing the Gates–something achieved in the Supreme Court before the death of Antonin Scalia, when three Jews and six Catholics made up the country’s most important judicial body. Others (now clearly a majority) on the contrary, aspire to join the WASP ranks, thus distinguishing not from the WASPs themselves, but from those Catholics who remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, essentially, recent immigrants from Latin America and the Philippines. The most radical wing of this latter group has pushed its “WASP-ing” agenda to the point of abandoning Catholicism for militant evangelicalism (Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Neil Gorsuch are the best known examples).

Modern Politics in Premodern History

How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king.

by AUDREY TRUSCHKE

This portrait of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb mounted on a horse, and ready for battle, was originally produced circa 1660.

In 1700, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was arguably the richest, most powerful man in the world. He ruled for nearly fifty years, from 1658 until 1707, over a vast empire in South Asia that boasted a population exceeding the entirety of contemporary Europe. Today, he has been forgotten in the West.

The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. Reproduced with permission from Juggernaut Books.

In modern-day India, however, Aurangzeb is alive in public debates, national politics, and people’s imaginations. From Mumbai to Delhi to Hyderabad, Indians debate his legacy and, overwhelmingly, condemn him as the cruelest king in Indian history. The list of charges against Aurangzeb is severe and, if they were all true, shocking. Aurangzeb, a Muslim, is widely thought to have destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. As I am reminded daily on Twitter, many Indians sincerely believe that Aurangzeb was Hitler and ISIS rolled into one with a single objective: To eradicate Hindus and Hinduism.

My narrative of Aurangzeb in Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King—based on extensive research and relying on primary source documents—does not match his current reputation. Accordingly, much of the response to Aurangzeb in India, published in February 2017 under the title Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, has been fierce. I am the target of daily, sometimes hourly, hate speech on social media. I am regularly attacked on the basis of my gender, nationality, race, and perceived religion. I have even faced (so far, limited) calls to ban Aurangzeb and even to ban me from India. In this blog post, I explore the roots of the controversy over Aurangzeb, my role therein as a historian, and the harsh realities of producing historical analysis in a world where many privilege politically expedient falsehoods.

Negotiating North Korea

Given the mixed results of the past, could sanctions work on North Korea moving forward?

by STEPHAN HAGGARD and MARCUS NOLAND

"North Korea Victory Day." Photo by Stefan Krawsowski. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Following the Mar-a-Lago summit, President Trump touted his cooperation with President Xi Jinping on North Korea as a diplomatic win. In the weeks since the summit, the outlines of the administration’s policy toward the peninsula have become more clear. Under the name of “maximum pressure and engagement,” Secretary Tillerson has outlined a strategy that includes more aggressive sanctions, while leaving military options open. Yet at the same time, he has promised that the United States would be willing to engage in negotiations—long a Chinese demand—were North Korea to express a willingness to discuss denuclearization. He has even stated that the United States is not seeking regime change nor unification and could provide North Korea security guarantees.

Hard Target » captures the effects of sanctions and inducements on North Korea and provides a detailed reconstruction of the role of economic incentives in the bargaining around the country's nuclear program.

The history of such two-track efforts, which have resurfaced repeatedly since the first North Korean nuclear crisis some 25 years ago, are often plagued by complications that undermine the strategy. In Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea, we investigate the history of these efforts, which are dogged by two problems. The first is that sanctions require coordination. At various times the United States has faced difficulty aligning not only China, but South Korea as well, around more robust pressure on the North. Since the onset of the second nuclear crisis in 2002, multilateral and other sanctions have had the perverse effect of pushing North Korea’s trade toward China, which now accounts for nearly 90 percent of bilateral merchandise trade. The changing geography of trade compounds these coordination problems. Getting North Korea to move has increasingly become a question of how to get China to move.

Xi Jinping’s decision to cooperate with the United States with respect to North Korea was also influenced in part by US sticks and carrots. Military blandishments might have helped spur China’s new engagement on the issue, reminding Beijing that North Korea is a strategic liability. The decision to abjure naming China a currency manipulator and threats of secondary sanctions—placing sanctions on Chinese entities doing business with North Korea—also might have had some effect. But the basis of cooperation with China undoubtedly rests on US commitments to re-enter negotiations if North Korea signals interest, with the inevitable discussion of quid-pro-quos and inducements that such negotiations necessarily entail.