In his visit to the Hoover Institution, Timothy Chin-tien Yang, minister of foreign affairs for the Republic of China (Taiwan), met with John Raisian, the Institution’s Tad and Dianne Taube Director, and toured the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He was accompanied by staff members from the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry: Harry Tseng, director general; Bang-Zyh Liu, deputy director general; and Yi-lung Wang, section chief, all from the Department of North American Affairs; also present were Director General Thomas Chen and Director Li-fang Huang of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco.
Richard Sousa, the director of libraries and archives, led the Hoover Archives tour, which featured a portion of the Institution’s significant East Asian collection. Of special interest were the collections’ documenting the history of modern China, including forty-nine collections of personal papers and records from individuals and Chinese organizations. Presented by Sousa, Research Fellow Hsiao-ting Lin, and Assistant Archivist Lisa Nguyen, were the Chiang Kai-shek diaries, which attract scholars from all over the world, as well as other material.
Other documents on display included records of the Kuomintang, China’s premier revolutionary party until it was defeated in 1949 by Chinese Communist Party forces and forced to relocate in Taiwan; political campaign materials from the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan; and papers from high-ranking figures in China’s nationalist history, such as T.V. Soong (foreign minister and premier of China during and after World War II), Victor Hoo, Yen Hui-Ching, and Jin Wensi. Those documents are part of an ongoing Modern China Archives Project that aims to add significant documents to the East Asian collections to illustrate events in modern Chinese history.
