Organizer and Chair: Julia C. Strauss, SOAS, University of London
Discussants: Xiaoping Cong, University of California, Los Angeles; Neil Diamant, Tel Aviv University; Joseph W. Esherick, University of California, San Diego; William Kirby, Harvard University; Julia C. Strauss, SOAS, University of London
The past several years have witnessed an unprecedented, if quiet, opening of access to archives in the People’s Republic of China. Foreign and foreign trained researchers are now able to work in more archives than ever before, the list of acceptable research topics continues to expand, and it is now increasingly possible to do something virtually unheard of only a few years ago—archival research on the post-1949 period.
Yet for all this welcome new openness, there is a downside to these positive trends. Availability of xeroxing, miscellaneous fees, direct access to catalogues, and stringency of the final approval process are only a few of the aspects of archival policy that vary enormously and somewhat capriciously from city to city, and institution to institution.
This roundtable seeks to de-mystify the process of archival research in China, discuss the range of present variation, and place the current trends into a larger framework of archival policy. Roundtable participants were selected to give the broadest possible coverage to these themes. Professors Esherick and Kirby have long been interested in, and written on, the state of the archives in China. The more junior scholars Strauss, Diamant and Cong have recently conducted research on a variety of pre- and post-1949 topics (on cadre policy in the 1950s, the state-society interface in the 1950s and higher education in the Republican period respectively), and in the past year each has worked in a minimum of three different archives spanning the country from Yunnan to Heilongjiang.