In March 2005 the Hoover Institution Archives announced a new initiative, the Modern China Archives and Special Collections, which includes archival and other special materials concerning the Republic of China from 1911 to 1949, Taiwan from 1949 to the present, and the evolution of mainland China from 1949 to the present.

The Hoover Institution undertook this initiative because, for many decades, its archives has collected and preserved a rich collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Western documents—including the private papers of individuals as well as the personal documents and official records of leaders and statesmen, government officials, missionaries, and engineers—related to the above periods.

In 2003 some of the rare materials describing the rise of the Communist and Nationalist Parties in mainland China and the rise of an opposition party in Taiwan were transferred from the Hoover Institution’s former East Asian Collection to the Hoover Institution Archives. Few, if any, copies of those materials exist in the public domain. Those materials have now been accessioned, placed on the Hoover website, and preserved for researchers to use in the Hoover Institution Archives.

In April 2004, the Hoover Institution opened the restricted nineteen boxes (from the original fifty-nine boxes received in 1976) of the personal papers of T. V. Soong, a leading official in the Nationalist government from the late 1920s to 1949, along with two thousand documents donated by the Soong family.

In August 2006, K’ung Hsiang-hsi family members donated his papers to the Hoover Institution.

To encourage researchers to use these new materials, we have established a new essay series of which this is the third monograph (the first is The Modern China Archives and Special Collections, and the second is T.V. Soong in Modern Chinese History). The series introduces new documents from our collections and suggests interpretations of events that may differ from those advanced earlier, especially as they relate to major turning points and significant historical changes in China’s recent history. (The essays reflect only the opinions of the authors.)

The essays also identify and discuss special materials that users might find of interest and assistance and provide an impetus for researchers to consult the Hoover Institution’s expanding Chinese archives and special collections.

Ramon H. Myers  (Forward)
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Visit Breaking with the Past: The Kuomintang Central Reform Committee on Taiwan, 1950–52 Download Pages

Ramon H. Myers
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Hsiao-ting Lin
Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution

Hoover Institution Press Publication
Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs.

Download Breaking with the Past: The Kuomintang Central Reform Committee on Taiwan, 1950–52

PDF format, 1.46MB, 32Pages.

Contents:
About the Authors iv
Foreword by Ramon H. Myers v
Introduction 1
Reinventing a New Political Party 2
Building a Strong Party and Leadership 6
Expanding the Party’s Social Foundation 8
Local-level Political Reforms 13
Promoting a Grand Vision:
Toward a Prosperous Economy with Equity 17
Concluding Remarks 21

About the Authors:

Ramon H. Myers is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the coauthor, with Linda Chao, of The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan and has written numerous articles about Taiwan’s political and economic history. His most recent work, with Jialin Zhang, is The Struggle Across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China Problem published by Hoover Institution Press in 2006.

Hsiao-Ting Lin is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution who received his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 2003. He is the author of Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49, T. V. Soong in Modern Chinese History: A Look at His Role in Sino-American Relations in World War II (with Tai-chun Kuo), and more than 30 essays, journal articles and book reviews. His academic interests include ethnopolitics in greater China, the political history of modern China, and the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) in post-1949 Taiwan.

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