1950–
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.
Activities and affiliations
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–현재Lifelong professor and director of the Cold War International History Studies Center at East China Normal University
Related historical events
- 1950–1953The Korean WarHistorian of the Korean WarHis writing on the Korean War traced the calculations among China, the Soviet Union, and Korea.
- 1949–1956From New Democracy to socialist transformationHistorian of the Sino-Soviet allianceReconstructed the 1950 treaty talks and the Korea decision from Soviet archives.
- 1956–1969The Sino-Soviet Splitleading scholar of the Chinese interpretationHe explained the split as a leadership contest within the international communist movement.
Collecting Declassified Archives and Building Research Infrastructure
Shen left academia in the mid-1980s for a successful business career in Shenzhen, returned to Beijing in the early 1990s, and founded a private history research organization there. He treated the early 1990s opening of Russian and former Soviet party-state archives as the turning point of his research life. In October 1994 he financed a Shenzhen conference on the historical lessons of the Soviet collapse with his own money, and in March 1995 he chaired a small Beijing meeting to vet the plan of buying documents in Moscow.
The undertaking was beyond what an individual purchase could carry. He approached Wang Renzhi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the two sides launched a joint project on Soviet historical documents: the Academy handled the necessary formal procedures, while Shen covered the entire project funding and directed the work. Arriving in Moscow in October 1995, the party found that the open period of 1992-1993 had already narrowed and that copying had grown more expensive. The Russian State Archive charged one dollar a page and the Communist Party Central Archive 2.8 dollars, but Russian archives billed their own citizens far less. Shen hosted Russian academic contacts, asked them to copy documents on his behalf, and paid them for the work, and in three months the group copied the needed materials at four major archives. He flew to Moscow again in April 1996, and in October of that year and again in 1998 he went to the United States, where the two trips yielded more than ten crates of copies of former Soviet documents, exceeding what he brought back from Russia. Travel, lodging, and fees together came to roughly one million yuan.
Over the following seven years he funded a translation and editorial team of more than seventy people nationwide to classify the documents and translate selected topics into Chinese. In August 2002, Social Sciences Academic Press, under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, issued the multi-volume Selection of Soviet Historical Archives: 34 volumes in 36 books, 227 topics, and nearly twenty million characters, covering 74 years of Soviet political, economic, military, diplomatic, social, and cultural records. By his own accounting he acquired 22 volumes of documents on Sino-Soviet relations, 17 on the Korean War, 9 on Soviet-North Korean relations, and 27 on Soviet history. He had already established the Oriental Historical Research Publication Fund under the Chinese Historical Association in the early 1990s to support scholarly publishing and research, and in 2004 he moved from individual research to training a research team, taking up a position at East China Normal University and the directorship of its Cold War international history center. The document-collecting project was the material foundation on which he could reread Sino-Soviet relations.