The liberal of the New Culture Movement who led the vernacular-language campaign and later served the Nationalists as a diplomat
A Columbia-trained pragmatist under John Dewey, he led the literary revolution that replaced classical Chinese with the written vernacular. A critic of both New Youth's Marxists and the Nationalist abandonment of constitutionalism, he died in Taipei in 1962.
A philosopher trained under John Dewey in the United States, he proposed literary reform in New Youth in 1917 and launched the vernacular-language movement. In the May Fourth years he urged “more study of problems, less talk of isms”, parting ways with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as they turned to Marxism. He was a professor and later president of Peking University and served as ambassador to the United States during the war with Japan. After 1949 he worked in the United States and Taiwan, while the mainland mounted a mass campaign against his thought in the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in Taipei.
Career timeline
- 1917–1926Professor at Peking University
- 1938–1942Ambassador of the Republic of China to the United States
- 1946–1948President of Peking University
The Nationalist diplomat whose presence at the Security Council table triggered the Soviet walkout
In January 1950, as Tsiang took the chair of the Security Council, Malik declared 'This is not a meeting, but a parody of a meeting' and walked out.
A historian of Qing diplomacy who became the Republic of China's most consequential Cold War diplomat. After a Columbia PhD and pioneering work in modern Chinese diplomatic history at Nankai and Tsinghua, he left academia in 1935 to serve the Nationalist government as ambassador to the Soviet Union and later as permanent representative to the United Nations. In January 1950, with Tsiang presiding over the Security Council, Soviet delegate Malik walked out rather than sit with a Nationalist Chinese representative, a boycott that left the Soviet veto unused when the Council voted in June to defend South Korea.
Career timeline
- 1923–1929Professor and Chair of History, Nankai University
- 1929–1935Chair of History and Dean of Arts, Tsinghua University
- 1935–1936Director of Political Affairs, Executive Yuan, Nationalist Government
- 1936–1938Ambassador of the ROC to the Soviet Union
- 1944–1946China Representative to UNRRA; Director, CNRRA
- 1947–1962Permanent Representative of the ROC to the UN and Security Council
- 1961–1965Ambassador of the ROC to the US (concurrent with UN post)
Ming historian and Beijing vice-mayor whose play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office became the fuse of the Cultural Revolution
A Chinese historian of the Ming dynasty who served as vice-mayor of Beijing after 1949. In November 1965 he fell from power when his play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was attacked as an anti-Mao allegory; the fallout also purged Beijing mayor Peng Zhen. He died in prison in 1969.
A Ming historian from Zhejiang and a student of Hu Shih, he was active in the Democratic League in the 1940s and after 1949 served as vice-mayor of Beijing for culture and education. His 1961 play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, written at Mao’s own suggestion, told of an upright official dismissed by the emperor; in November 1965 Yao Wenyuan’s attack on it as a “poisonous weed” defending Peng Dehuai was the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution. Arrested in 1966, he died in prison in 1969; his wife and daughter also died in the persecution. He was rehabilitated in 1979.
Career timeline
- 1949–1966Vice-Mayor of Beijing
The Xinhua reporter who lost his father to the famine and, in Tombstone, documented 36 million Great Famine deaths
A Xinhua reporter who from the mid-1990s raided provincial archives to compile the first detailed account of the Great Famine, published in 2008 as Tombstone: 36 million dead.
From Hubei, he watched his adoptive father starve in the Great Leap famine of 1959 without knowing it was a nationwide disaster. As a Xinhua reporter he began in the 1990s to search archives and interview survivors across the country, and after more than a decade published Tombstone in Hong Kong in 2008. The book estimates about 36 million famine deaths in 1958–1962 and traces them to the communes, forced procurement and “anti-rightist” politics; it is banned on the mainland. His history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, followed in 2016. He was deputy publisher of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu.
Career timeline
- 1968–2001Reporter for the Xinhua News Agency
A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives
In 1995 he spent over a million yuan of his own money to buy declassified Russian archives, which he then opened to fellow scholars free of charge.
Shen Zhihua is a historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet relations who led the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University. He expanded the documentary basis of Chinese Cold War scholarship by personally collecting declassified Russian materials and editing large archival compilations. His work explains the Sino-Soviet split through the interaction of state interests and competition within the international communist movement, questioning accounts that reduce China’s choices to ideological solidarity alone. His studies of the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet alliance trace the calculations of China, the Soviet Union, and Korea, bringing a major Chinese interpretation of the Cold War to an international readership.
Career timeline
- 1950Born in Beijing
- 1971–1978Worker and propaganda cadre at Shijingshan Power Plant
- 1978–1982Graduate student in world history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
- 1983–1984Imprisoned on a state-secrets charge, released early
- 1993–2002Founded a private historical research center and edited Soviet archival collections
- 2004–presentLifelong professor and director of the Cold War International History Studies Center at East China Normal University
Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement
His How the Red Sun Rose (2000) reconstructed the Yan'an Rectification Movement from party documents and memoirs, treating it as the process through which Mao consolidated personal authority and fixed the party's later methods.
Born in Nanjing, he grew up watching his father persecuted as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and taught modern Chinese history at Nanjing University. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, published in Hong Kong in 2000, reconstructed the movement of 1942–1945 from published sources alone, showing how Mao concentrated the party’s power in himself through thought reform, cadre screening and the “rescue campaign”, and set the template for later political campaigns. Banned on the mainland but widely read there, he died of liver cancer in 2011.
Career timeline
- 1978–2011Professor of history, Nanjing University
An economist who traces state policy through historical data
“To us, that was amazing … In the beginning, we could not believe it, but that is what the data show.”
Nancy Qian is an economist whose work spans development economics, political economy, and economic history, using large datasets and rigorous empirical methods to study how institutions and policy shape people’s lives. Her research on China and autocratic states connects questions of gender inequality, education, and the political economy of famine. With Andrei Markevich and Natalya Naumenko, she coauthored a 2021 study that compared regional mortality and grain procurement, presenting quantitative evidence on ethnic bias and centrally planned procurement during the Ukrainian famine. The study contributes data to debates that treat the Holodomor not only as a problem of production, but also as an outcome of state allocation and coercive procurement.
Career timeline
- 2001B.A., University of Texas at Austin
- 2005Ph.D. in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2005–2009Assistant Professor of Economics, Brown University
- 2007–2009Harvard Academy Fellow, Harvard University
- 2009–2016Professor and Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University
- 2017–presentJames J. O’Connor Professor, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
- 2021Coauthor of “The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932–33”
