Chao Tze-chi was born in 1914 in Rehe Province in Manchuria (which today lies in a part of Inner Mongolia). After graduation from Nankai University (Tianjin), Chao joined the Nationalist Chinese army and, between 1937 and 1945, fought in the Sino-Japanese War. After World War II, Chao was tasked with restoration operations of the Japanese-occupied Rehe Province on behalf of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). He was elected a member of the Legislative Yuan in the spring of 1948. A year later, Chao retreated to Taiwan along with the Chinese Nationalist government. Between 1950 and 1989, Chao held multiple crucial party and government positions, serving as political adviser to four presidents of Taiwan: Chiang Kai-shek, Yen Chia-kan, Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui. In 1989, Chao was elected president of the World Anti-Communist League (subsequently renamed the World League for Freedom and Democracy), a position he held until 1999. With the platform of the World League for Freedom and Democracy, Chao endeavored to break Taiwan’s international isolation and broaden the island state’s external relations by promoting civil and Track II diplomacy. The most important breakthrough Chao achieved in the 1990s was cementing Taiwan’s relationship with the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States and the newly democratized Eastern European countries. He also played a key role in reconnecting Taipei’s relationship with the fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile in India. Chao died in Taipei in August 2020, at the age of 107.
The Chao papers include more than sixty volumes of personal diaries, ranging from the late 1940s to the early 2010s, photo images of Chao’s political and diplomatic activities, news clippings, and other miscellaneous materials dating back as early as the 1930s. The collection joins the personal diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo, and many other Taiwan-related collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, enriching our understanding of the complicated history of pre-1949 Nationalist China and post-1949 Taiwan.
Chao Tze-chi (right) and Perng Fai-nan (left), soon to be governor of the Central Bank of Taiwan, pay a courtesy call to Senator Bob Dole during the latter’s visit to Taiwan, 1997.
In November 1992 Chao Tze-chi visits the Dalai Lama at the latter’s residence in Dharamshala, India, cementing a bilateral relationship that had been detached for over two decades.
The collection is currently undergoing preservation treatment and archival processing. Future access to the personal papers of Chao Tze-chi will be available in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives reading room. Please contact hoover-library-archives@stanford.edu for information concerning access.
Hsiao-ting Lin is a research fellow and curator of the Modern China collection at the Hoover Institution, for which he collects material on China and Taiwan, as well as China-related materials in other East Asian countries.
