Collection of Diplomatic Documents in the Republic of China Era 1911-1949

Chief Editor: Wang Jianlang

Publisher: Zhonghua Book Company

Collection of Diplomatic Documents in the Republic of China Era 1911-1949 was published in December, 2015. The large collection is the result of joint endeavors by the Department of History of Sino-Foreign Relations, part of the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese  Academy of Social Sciences. These efforts have spanned across three generations. Although the history of the Republican Era emerged as an independent discipline as late as 1978, related studies have been underway for much longer.

Arranging a complex set of diplomatic documents like these is never easy. In this case, it was particularly difficult because the domestic conditions in the Republican Era were fairly complicated. The nation at that time was not united, with many political groups standing out, and constant outbreaks of civil and foreign warfare. Foreign power had considerable influence over Chinese internal and external affairs. Under these circumstances, diplomacy during that period had many distinct characteristics. For example, the diplomatic system changed many times, and a large number of domestic affairs became foreign affairs.

Historical materials in the collection fall under three broad categories. The first category includes published archival files, government gazettes, diplomatic communiques, newspapers and magazine reports, diaries and memoirs of the people concerned, as well as unpublished archival documents. The second category involves all types of diplomatic documents of the Republican period preserved in archives, such as the Second Historical Archive of China in Nanjing. Materials in this category comprise more than 2 million words, a large proportion of which have been published for the first time. The third category of documents contains published diplomatic documents and unpublished archives that were translated from foreign countries, such as Foreign Relations of the United States, British Diplomatic Documents, French Foreign Documents, German Diplomatic Documents, Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union and Japanese Foreign Documents, as well as documents collected in archives in Britain, the United States, Russia and Japan.

The collection was divided into 10 volumes according various periods, namely, diplomacy in the early Republican period (1911-1918); diplomacy around the time of the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference (1918-1924); diplomacy of the Peking government in its later period (1924-1928); diplomacy of the Guangzhou government (1917-1928); diplomacy of the Nanjing National Government in its early years (1928-1931); three volumes of the diplomacy during the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression period (1931-1945); diplomacy in the post-war age; and diplomacy during the full-scale civil war period (1945-1949).

The collection included all typical materials, regardless of the contrasting ideas they might hold, attempting to objectively present a panorama of diplomatic conditions at that time. In other words, the editors aimed not to prove their own academic point of view, but to demonstrate the facts of multiple aspects.