The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired the papers of Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001), a renowned political scientist and China expert who played a crucial role in the negotiations that led to the normalization of US-China relations in early 1979. The papers consist of interview transcripts of US and Chinese officials involved in the normalization of relations, along with research notes, rare Chinese maps, newspapers and local gazetteers of Shandong Province, and photos and slides of Oksenberg’s activities in China (including Jimmy Carter’s 1997 trip to Shandong Province) in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The collection complements several other Hoover collections, including the recently opened personal diary of Chiang Ching-kuo, in providing a broad landscape of the process of the US-China normalization as well as the intricate Washington-Beijing-Taipei relationship from the early 1970s to the 1990s.
