This month Hoover Library & Archives congratulates Dr. Hsiao-ting Lin, Curator for Modern China, whose book Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Harvard University Press, 2016) received the 2017 Kingstone Award for Most Influential Book of the Year in Taiwan. Dr. Lin's previous book, Siege and Counterattack: Taiwan’s Options in the Cold War, which was nominated for the 2015 Hong Kong Book Prize, has been translated and is a finalist for the 2017 Book of the Year awarded by the Beijing News/The Tencent Cultural Channel in China. Both books feature research conducted in Hoover’s extensive holdings on twentieth-century China.
As a curator and research fellow at Hoover, Dr. Lin collects material on China and Taiwan, as well as China-related materials in other East Asian countries. He holds a BA in political science from National Taiwan University (1994) and an MA in international law and diplomacy from National Chengchi University in Taiwan (1997). He received his DPhil in oriental studies in 2003 from the University of Oxford, where he also held an appointment as tutorial fellow in modern Chinese history. In 2003–4, Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, he was awarded the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellowship by the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. In 2005–7, he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he participated in Hoover’s Modern China Archives and Special Collections project.
In April 2008, Lin was elected a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his contributions to the studies of modern China’s history. Lin’s academic interests include ethnopolitics and minority issues in greater China, border strategies and defenses in modern China, political institutions and the bureaucratic system of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), and US-Taiwan military and political relations during the Cold War. He has published extensively on modern Chinese and Taiwanese politics, history, and ethnic minorities.
