The Party School: The Kuomintang's Central Political Institute and the Transformation of Chinese Foreign Policy

About

Speaker: Anatol Klass, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This presentation follows the careers of a group of Chinese foreign policy experts who were chosen as college students in the 1930s to receive specialized training at the ruling Nationalist Party's civil service school. The speaker traces this cohort from the shared experience of an experimental educational program meant to instill the expertise necessary for modern diplomacy, through its bifurcation after the 1949 revolution. Almost half of the Kuomintang-trained experts stayed in Mainland China to work for the foreign policy apparatus of the new communist state while the other half followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan and continued to work for the Republic of China. The speaker argues that this group of 130 bureaucrats had an outsized impact on 20th century Chinese foreign policy and, unexpectedly, continued to work in parallel from Taipei and Beijing, across the political divides of Mao Zedong's revolution and the Cold War.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqfuCtqDIjE92P1HubU-5jia7a5zl1QVWj

Contact

For more information, email the International Security Program Assistant at susan_lynch@harvard.edu.