Author: Anatol Klass 柯岸濤

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