The fifth annual Hoover Institution Workshop on Modern China, entitled “Crossing the 1949 Divide: The Hoover Archives and Contemporary Chinese History,” was held during July 31 and August 4, 2017. Co-organized and cosponsored with the Seminar of East Asian Studies, Free University of Berlin, this year the workshop featured seven speakers from the United States, Germany, Austria, and Taiwan who explored Hoover’s unique modern China collections and evaluated how these historical treasures help reshape our understanding of contemporary China and post-1949 Taiwan. Workshop attendees presented their research to over three hundred audience from the Hoover/Stanford community as well as to researchers and mass media in the San Francisco Bay Area.