About the Collection
The Chinese Soviet Republic database is made up of almost 2,500 records spanning 1922 to 1956. The collection is especially concentrated between the establishment of the Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) in November 1931 and its effective collapse in 1934 under pressure from the Kuomintang (KMT) Army’s encirclement campaign. The collection contains constitutions, directives, and resolutions that formed the basis of the CSR government. Included as well are denunciations, military reports, and court decisions that reflect the struggle to maintain the CSR through the war. While the Long March that followed this period is well-documented, the materials in this collection represent some of the most valuable and rare from the early years of the Communist Party in China.
more...Many scholars were involved in the collection’s preservation. Originally called the Chen Cheng collection after the former KMT Army general who brought them to Taiwan, these documents were made available in North America by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and later cataloged in detail through an initiative at the Harvard-Yenching Library. The collection reflects its original collector: hundreds of documents originate in bound volumes by the KMT with titles like “A Collection of Secret Documents of the Red Bandits” or “Red Documents.” However, the materials are truly primary sources. The majority of the records appear just as they were published in their original print. A minority were copied painstakingly, word for word, for recordkeeping by the KMT or reprinting and propagation by CSR Political Departments.
From formal publications to scrawled lecture notes, documents span entities, classes, and viewpoints. The collection boasts the largest number of electronic issues of Red China (195 issues in total), the official newspaper of the Provisional Central Government of the CSR. Ten plays from the Worker and Peasant Drama Club of a military academy, four songbooks, and almost 100 open letters, many of which are handwritten, reveal the extent of mass mobilization in the CSR. Over 100 editorials and almost 30 denunciations lay bare the political struggles at play in the CSR. This collection captures the full range of individuals, interests, and ideologies in China in the 1930’s.
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