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Abstract--In July 1930, the Kuomintang party school, the Central Political Institute (zhongyang zhengzhi xuexiao), established a new Diplomacy Department and welcomed its first cohort of ten students into a program designed to train young party members for careers in the Nationalist government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the course of the next decade, more than 130 young men and women were admitted to this highly selective department where they studied a curriculum that had been specifically designed to produce a new generation of Chinese foreign policy experts, combining rigorous language training with novel theories of international politics. This talk argues that the 130 graduates from this program were at the heart of a movement to transform Chinese foreign policymaking that began in the 1930s but continued throughout World War II and the Cold War, profoundly shaping how both Beijing and Taipei pursue their global agendas to the present day. Nearly half of the Diplomacy Department alumni stayed in Mainland China after 1949, working for the new communist state’s foreign policy apparatus, and this network of Kuomintang-trained diplomats exercised considerable influence on both sides of the Taiwan Strait throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. In this presentation, Anatol Klass will introduce this cohort: their education, their careers, and the manner in which they helped bring about a strategic reorientation and a structural transformation in Chinese diplomacy during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Bio: Anatol Klass is a CWP fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. He is a historian with research interests focused on twentieth-century China. Anatol’s first book project examines the bureaucratic development of the institutions through which the Chinese state engages with the world and the professional identities of experts working within those institutions. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024.

This event is a hybrid with both in-person attendees and an online audience. It is sponsored by the China and the World Program and co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

To register for the event online please register here or https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tflyHY3mQWCExWeE39hbGA

If you are attending in-person, please go to: INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS BUILDING AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - 420 W. 118TH ST., NEW YORK, NY 10027 ROOM 918