Hoover Hosts Annual Summer Workshop on Modern China and Taiwan

The 2026 Hoover Institution Workshop on Modern China and Taiwan was held August 3-7, 2026. This year the workshop featured five speakers from the United States and Britain who explored Hoover's unique archival collections and evaluated how these historical treasures help reshape our understanding of modern China and post-1949 Taiwan. Workshop presenters spoke to 250 attendees, including members of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University community as well as researchers in this area of scholarship and San Francisco Bay Area media. The following experts presented at the event:

Steve Tsang (SOAS, University of London) kick-started this year's workshop with a presentation on his recent book on Xi Jinping. With the introduction of Xi Jinping Thought, which replaced Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic approach of "bide and hide," Xi has put in place a new global strategy for China. As Tsang illustrated, this strategy has two pivots. The primary pivot is toward the Global South, where winning support is central to Xi's vision of forging a common destiny for humankind through a process he calls "the democratization of international relations." This ambition is a fundamental aspect of Xi's goal for China to assume a preeminent position in an international system, with a goal of transforming what remains of the liberal international order into a Sino-centric tianxia (inclusion of all) order. The second or complementary pivot is toward Chinese control of Taiwan, against US wishes. Establishing sovereignty over Taiwan is envisioned as a transformational event marking the advent of Chinese global preeminence. Tsang argued that Xi's vision is for China to establish global dominance on Beijing's terms, yet not to replace the US as the global hegemon, as doing so would imply endorsement of global hegemony on the terms laid down by Washington since 1945.

Justin Wu (California State University, Sacramento) reexamined the Baodiao movement (Defend the Diaoyu Islands movement) of the early 1970s, which was prompted by a US proposal to place the uninhabited islands under Japanese administration. The islands had been under US occupation since the end of World War II. Taiwanese and Hong Kong students in the United States, echoing the nationalist spirit and anti-imperialist sentiment of the May Fourth Movement (1919), demanded the recognition of Chinese sovereignty over the islands. The question was, which "China" were they talking about: the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan or the People's Republic of China (PRC) in mainland China? The vision of a unified Chinese nation, transcending political borders and division, sparked a heated debate among students with different ideological orientations. Wu's presentation focused on student activists in Northern California and their discourse on China during this period. Influenced by the anti-imperialist sentiment of the era and drawn to the appeal of global Maoism, many turned to the PRC and supported cross-strait unification of mainland China and Taiwan under PRC rule. Their efforts to promote a positive image of the PRC in the United States, when fear of "Red China" loomed large in the public imagination, included activities such as screening Maoist documentaries and staging pro-PRC dramas. The end of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC left many disillusioned by the idea of a socialist utopia. Despite their disappointment, they continued to seek refuge in the ideal of "China," believing that striving for a unified China should remain the ultimate goal of the Chinese nation.

Barak Kushner (University of Cambridge) showcased how the end of Japanese imperial rule in 1945 catalyzed a new wave of militarization within formerly agrarian societies across East Asia. While the Japanese metropole was compelled to "civilianize" its institutions, regions that emerged from the shadow of Japanese domination underwent a transformation in the opposite direction. Pressure to create new state militaries emerged from fears that Japan's surrender would lead not to peace but to further conflict. Under mounting anxiety to guard newly defined borders and establish national security, South and North Korea, the Republic of China, and the People's Republic of China saw the need to rapidly transform their formerly politically based armed forces into state militaries. As Kushner argued, the four major successor states-the two Chinas and the two Koreas-faced the same strategic problem: how to transform irregular or partisan forces into legitimate state militaries. His presentation elucidated that the concepts of a hierarchical command structure, domestic mobilization, and ideological discipline migrated by way of these countries' relationships with Japanese imperial forces in numerous direct and indirect ways. As a result, early post-imperial East Asia inherited a regional order where the military, rather than civil institutions, became the core of state power. This militarization, Kushner concluded, later had a profound impact on the evolution of bilaterial and multilateral relations in the region.

Judd C. Kinzley (University of Wisconsin-Madison) traced the history of Chinese businesspeople and their connection with the economic roots of American Cold War power. From 1940 to 1945, the United States relied heavily on a steady stream of Chinese tungsten ore, hog bristles, and tung oil to power its wartime industry. The flow of Chinese products to the United States was possible only through the efforts of a small handful of Chinese business owners, who served as linchpins in a vast wartime production network that channeled raw materials from China's rural hinterland to American factories. As Kinzley's analysis showed, their wartime efforts helped lay the foundation for a postwar, Cold War order supported in part by the US exchange of dollars for resources from allied countries throughout Latin America and the Pacific. He focused on one of these business owners, a man named Li Guoqin (or K. C. Li), who was later known as China's "Tungsten King," to reveal the powerful role that these individuals played in shaping the dimensions of American power in East Asia, Latin America, and the wider Cold War world.

Joel Cabrita (Stanford University) closed this year's workshop by presenting new research on how American Protestant missionaries expelled from China after 1949 helped reshape the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into a humanitarian actor in Asia during the early Cold War. The Communist victory in China displaced thousands of American missionaries with extensive experience in education, medicine, and social reform. Many of these "China hands" were recruited into CIA-funded front organizations such as the Asia Foundation at precisely the moment when US policymakers were seeking new instruments to contain communism. Cabrita argued that these missionaries fundamentally transformed CIA-funded Cold War initiatives. Bringing with them the ideals of the Protestant Social Gospel, they infused Agency programs like the Asia Foundation with a distinctive blend of welfare provision, moral reform, Christian evangelism, and anti-communist strategy, producing what she described as a new form of "Cold War humanitarianism." In Taiwan, Asia Foundation projects in publishing, education, and social services helped sustain a Christianity-infused vision of "Free China" aligned with US geopolitical interests. Rather than simply instrumentalizing missionaries, Cabrita argued, the CIA itself was reshaped by their presence. In important respects, the Agency became an institutional successor to the American missionary enterprise in Asia, as the goals and character of its covert operations were transformed by the missionaries who staffed and directed many of its programs.