Month: December 2022

You come for one thing and leave with another. I’m sure that we’ve all experienced this before…maybe in a thrift store? Flea market?  Those teacups are just too cute to pass up (yes, they were next to the other kitchen wares, which are already my Achilles’ heel, but they caught my eye, and I had to have them). Maybe it’s peanut candy in Tainan (台南) when you initially were craving something salty, or a nice rain jacket when you were browsing used clothes for nothing in particular (heavens, it came in handy, let me tell ya because Taiwan was wet this winter!). But at some point or another, I feel like we all have entered some place, or some situation, with one set (or no sets!) of expectations and left that same place-situation with a different-than-expected outcome.  This miniature surprise (or maybe it’s hardly miniature, but colossal, (and maybe it’s not a surprise, but anticipated)), or turning on our heads of what we thought we could expect, changes us in some way. Maybe it catches us off guard when we discover an interest in buying many more little charms than we could ever think we needed: teacups, house plants, peanut

I spent my time in Taiwan conducting archival research for my dissertation on the intellectual and bureaucratic development of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Republican Period to the twilight of the Cold War. My project begins by looking at the education and training of a new generation of diplomats within the Kuomintang (KMT) party system and the Republican bureaucracy, particularly those who graduated from the Foreign Affairs Department (waijiao xi) of the KMT’s Central School of Governance (zhongyang zhengzhi xuexiao).  I then follow those young bureaucrats as they entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1930s and 1940s, deploying their newly acquired diplomatic skills and philosophies to transform the structure, functions, and orientation of the institution. Finally, I trace the rise of these individuals to positions of prominence within the two Chinese diplomatic systems, one in Beijing and the other in Taipei, during the early Cold War.  Nearly half of the Foreign Affairs Department alumni stayed in Mainland China after 1949 and this network of KMT-trained diplomats exercised considerable influence on both sides of the Taiwan Straits throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s.  By tracing the long arc of these diplomats’ careers, I am