Peter Donovan - Chinese Communist Materials at the Bureau of Investigation Archives, Taiwan

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS IN CHINESE STUDIES

NO. 24

CHINESE COMMUNIST MATERIALS AT THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION ARCHIVES, TAIWAN

by

Peter Donovan, Carl E. Dorris, and Lawrence R. Sullivan

Ann Arbor

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

1976

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program

ISBN 0-89264-024-3

Copyright 1976

by

Center for Chinese Studies

The University of Michigan

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-89264-024-9 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-12787-0 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-472-90183-8 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

CONTENTS

Research on this project was carried out at the Bureau of Investigation, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China, from August 1973 to January 1974. We would like to thank Mr. Ch'en Sen-wen, chief of the Documents Section, and his staff for their cooperation. We would also like to express our gratitude to Knight Biggerstaff, Y. C. Chang, Albert Feuerwerker, Richard Howard, John Israel, Michel Oksenberg, Richard Solomon, and P. K. Yu for their criticisms of earlier drafts of this survey. Special thanks is given to Harriet Mills and Wan Weiying for their painstaking help in documentary translations and to John Ma who suggested this project. In addition, we must thank the Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, for its financial support towards the preparation of this manuscript, Andrea Morgan, Jeannie Lin, and Gay McDonald for their editing and excellent typing, and Dorothy Perng for her calligraphy.

Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Program and the Foreign Area Fellowship Program for supporting the dissertation research in Taiwan from which this survey was drawn.

Peter Donovan

Carl E. Dorris

Lawrence R. Sullivan

During the long years of civil strife in China the Nationalist authorities amassed extensive materials on their Communist adversaries. Now stored in government institutions on Taiwan these materials are an excellent source for the study of the Chinese Communist movement. Two collections open for research are especially important. One is the Bureau of Intelligence, Ministry of Defense, in Shih-lin, Taipei City, which provides good documentation on military history and, more generally, on all Chinese Communist affairs after 1949.

The BIC holds over 300,000 volumes of primary documents on the Chinese Communist movement.

While the Bureau admits outside scholars, it uses these materials on the Communist movement primarily for its own research and publications.

Certain aspects of the Chinese Communist movement are particularly well documented in BIC materials, and these are stressed in this survey of the collection.0

By period, the BIC's greatest strength lies in documents from 1927 to 1949. There are some earlier materials, but the 19211927 period of CCP history is better documented in the Kuomintang archives in Ch'ing-t'an, Taipei County. The War of Resistance (19371945) is probably the best documented period in the collection. The Civil War (19461949) is also well covered.

Geographically, the majority of BIC documents come from the Party's major base areas at any time: Shanghai in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Kiangsi Soviet from 1931 to 1934, and the North China base areas after 1937. Also represented are secondary areas of operation such as those in Manchuria, Hopeh, Anhwei, Chekiang, and the O-Y-Wan Soviet during the early 1930s; Central China during the War of Resistance and Civil War periods; and Hainan Island during the Civil War and post-Liberation periods.

The Bureau's own card catalogue is roughly organized by a decimal system peculiar to government institutions on Taiwan. Works on the Chinese Communist movement fall mainly under "periodicals," "the Chinese Communist Party," "the Communist International," and "social sciences." But within these categories there is no particular order by title or author, either by phonetic system or stroke order. Cards give title, author, publisher, and place and date of publication where the information can be easily determined from the documents, but most cards are incomplete. In addition, the card catalogue fails to list all the BIC's holdings. Indeed, it does not list many important documents from the Central Committee in the early 1930s and omits all of its newspapers. Unfortunately, as the user must call for books and may not enter the stacks, he is forced to rely on the card catalogue.

Another serious problem is the condition of the documents. Some are yellowed and crumbling, and on others the characters have faded. Some are printed or mimeographed from handwriting; yet others are original handwritten documents, often in almost indecipherable cursive script. Some documents are damaged. All have been bound.

Our purpose in this survey is, without any attempt at a comprehensive listing of the Bureau's holdings, to give scholars a representative description of the collection. Also, we shall point out its implications for research on some of the important issues in the history of the Chinese Communist movement and suggest new areas for research at the Bureau in the fields of political science and history.

FOOTNOTES TO INTRODUCTION

. For a description of materials in the Bureau of Intelligence, see Appendix A.

. Tiao-ch'a-ch, Ssu-fa-pu, Hsin-tien, T'ai-pei hsien

. A Brief Introduction of the Library ( Tzu-liao chien-chieh (Hsin-tien, Taipei: The Research Institute and Library, Investigation Bureau, Ministry of Justice, no date). According to the staff, all the documents on file are from the Bureau's original central headquarters in Nanking.

. Peter J. Seybolt's brief but useful guide to research on the CCP discusses the BIC. See Peter J. Seybolt, The Chinese Communist Movement 19211949; Sources and Perspectives, paper delivered at a meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, 1972.

. Materials on the Chinese Communist Party ( Ykan Chgoku Kysanto shiry (Tokyo: Yushodo Film Publications, Ltd.). Twenty reels of microfilm, 393 items. Yushodo published a checklist of the documents in this collection, and the Harvard-Yenching Library has compiled another list alphabetized by title (Wade-Giles system) with information on author, date of publication, etc. See Seybolt, p. 6.