UC Berkeley

In the summer of 1930, the Central Committee of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party, reorganized the academic structure at its party school, the Central Political Institute. After the KMT completed its Northern Expedition in late 1928, unifying China and establishing its Nationalist regime in Nanjing, the party school switched its focus from the political education of revolutionary cadres to the technocratic training of future civil servants, establishing a set of departments with bespoke curricula that were meant to produce the next generation of Chinese judges, local administrators, and, after the 1930 reorganization, diplomats. This dissertation is a prosopographical study of the 130 students who joined the KMT party school’s Diplomacy Department during the first decade after its founding.

The early chapters explore the experiences of these students while studying at the Central Political Institute as they studied the curriculum that party leaders had designed for them, an ideologically infused blend of technocratic skills and novel theories of international relations. The later chapters focus on how these students put their training into practice during their later careers during World War II and the Cold War, working within the diplomatic systems of both the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, the cohort bifurcated with nearly half of the Diplomacy Department graduates moving to Taiwan with the party that had trained them while an equivalent number of their former classmates chose to stay in China and work for the Chinese Communist Party’s new government. The final chapters consider the respective trajectories of these two groups with identical training and educational backgrounds after they were separated by the Cold War divide, working in two very different political contexts during the final decades of their careers.

Theories of global politics that circulated on campus at the party school, both those that were taught in the classroom and others that students developed on their own in response to the political and intellectual currents of the 1930s, continued to shape the foreign policy approach of graduates long after they had left the Central Political Institute. As students studied theories of “diplomatic administration” that were inspired by academic managerialism, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began a process of rapid institutional expansion and bureaucratization. Other Diplomacy Department students gravitated towards ideas of “revolutionary diplomacy” in school, an ideologically driven approach to Chinese foreign policy that emphasized building relationships with anticolonial political movement around the world rather than continuing to appease China’s imperial tormentors. This global outlook became increasingly important to Chinese global strategy as a mid-century wave of decolonization swept around the world and dozens of new nations gained independence. Finally, as party school students studied the links between China’s international interests and the Chinese diaspora, the global architecture of Chinese diplomacy increasingly came to mirror the distribution of overseas Chinese populations around the world. Together, these trends constituted a mid-century bureaucratic transformation and strategic reorientation of Chinese foreign policy. Central Political Institute graduates were not solely responsible for those changes, but their education and later careers were deeply intertwined with this evolution in the larger diplomatic system.

After the bifurcation of 1949, parallel diplomatic systems emerged in China and Taiwan comprised of institutions and personnel with their roots in the bureaucratic transformations of the pre-revolutionary period. This continuity across the 1949 divide is largely in line with trends that historians of early PRC state and society have observed in other domains, but accounts of the new state’s foreign affairs have largely still emphasize total rupture from what came before. This dissertation’s focus on the technocratic inheritance that the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs received from its Republican predecessor helps extend the continuity thesis to the history of Chinese foreign affairs. Similarly, while this project builds on a rich body of literature that has assessed the state-building efforts of the Kuomintang and its Nationalist regime, it does so not to continue the debate over whether those efforts were effective or self-defeating. Instead of studying these initiatives in terms of the Nationalist government’s eventual collapse, this dissertation considers them as part of a longue durée process of Chinese state-formation, building on the efforts of previous regimes and with long afterlives across the twentieth century and into the present day.