It's true what they say--time really does fly when you are having fun. It is hard to believe that my research trip to China is almost already over. After having spent two and half weeks in Shanghai and about one week in Beijing, I've accomplished a lot, even more than I expected. I had several successful forays into archives here in which I collected dozens of documents from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and have had a handful of extremely fruitful meetings and reunions with Chinese professors and old friends. But I still can't help but feel like I have more questions than answers, that there still more people I would like to meet, and that there more archives I wish I could explore. I simply need more time!

Though disappointed I have to leave China so soon, I am delighted with how this trip has turned out. In the remainder of the post I offer some initial thoughts on my research--what I learned and what remains to be done.

When I applied for funding from the Sigur Center my idea was to conduct research on China's relations with the Soviet Union inside of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Located in the far northwest and situated along the Sino-Soviet border, Xinjiang was both an area for cooperation in the 1950s and then a sticking point in the 1960s between Beijing and Moscow. During a previous research trip to Beijing I discovered hundreds of documents on Sino-Soviet relations in Xinjiang at the Foreign Ministry Archive, and so my research plan for this summer was to really dig into those materials.

But as fate would have it, the Foreign Ministry Archive is no longer as accessible as it once was. So instead of Beijing, I came here to Shanghai to get a lay of the land in terms of the local archives. I couldn't be happier with what I discovered here. I found hundreds of documents--many more than I could possibly process in just a few short weeks--on the connections between Shanghai and Xinjiang in general and on the dispatch of perhaps 100,000 Chinese youth from Shanghai to the far northwest in the 1960s in particular.

Shanghai youth in Xinjiang. Image via SHZQ.org

This is a subject which I admittedly knew little about prior to my forays into the archives here, but I have become absolutely fascinated by this topic. I  am eager to continue studying the relocation of the Shanghai youth to Xinjiang both as a political movement and as a human experience, but in the mean time here are some preliminary thoughts:

Most of the documents I've obtained were produced by and for political leaders and deal with the mobilization of Shanghai's educated youth to take part in Xinjiang's economic development in the 1960s. The impetus for the mass mobilization seems to be two-fold, both pragmatic and yet strongly ideological.

Many of the documents, for example, refer to the growing urban population and the increasing shortage of jobs for middle school and high school graduates. Xinjiang, it is often noted, however, has precisely the opposite problem: not enough people for a land of great economic promise and opportunity. So Shanghai's leaders believed there was a convergence of interests and needs between the two regions and thus began the campaign to send youth to the northwest.

A handful of documents from the Huangpu District Archives

At the same time, many of the documents also feature Chinese political leaders emphasizing that Shanghai's youth had grown too comfortable living in urban environments and had come to despise agricultural labor, look down upon factory workers, and in general lacked the revolutionary vigor of the older generations. Wanting to correct these ideological imbalances and ensure that socialism in China would continue to develop unhindered, Chinese leaders believed that it would be a valuable experience for Chinese youth to take part in hard labor in rugged Xinjiang.

In future research I will need to continue to tease out both the origins of the movement to send Shanghai's educated youth to Xinjiang as well the evolution of the movement as it unfolded from 1963 onward. Significantly, however, I also need to understand the human component of this story. These were real people sent to Xinjiang--some of them enthusiastically went to the northwest (I found one document describing how a teenager wrote a letter demanding he be allowed to go to Xinjiang using not a pen, but his own blood), while many of them were forced to move faraway from families and friends to a strange and hostile environment. Though additional documents from Shanghai's archives will help reveal the personal stories of this experience, oral history could be a better method to capture and understand this history. Many of the youth petitioned the government for permission to return to Shanghai in the 1980s, and those that are still alive today should be in their 60s and 70s. It can only be hoped that some of them will be willing to open up to an interested stranger.

Charles Kraus, Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Sigur Center 2013 Research Fellow
Shanghai, China

In China, you often hear about “guanxi,” or one’s personal relationships. Guanxi is the grease that keeps society’s wheels turning in China; for a foreign researcher such as myself, guanxi is absolutely essential for a successful trip.

But why is guanxi so important for research?

In a previous post on Asia on E Street, I had mentioned that I needed something called a “letter of introduction” in order to gain entry into Shanghai's archives. This is a letter that the Director of the Sigur Center, Edward McCord, wrote on my behalf and which verifies that I am student at GWU. The letter, written on official GWU letterhead, also requests that I be allowed to conduct research.

Having this type of letter from one's home institution is typically a requirement for getting into Chinese archives, but often it alone is not enough. Archives also want to see a similar letter from a Chinese institution or university (what is called a “guonei danwei,” or domestic work unit). As I wrote about before, for example, the Zhabei District Archives would not grant me any access without a letter from a Chinese institution, while the Shanghai Municipal Archives only granted me one-week of conditional access pending delivery of this letter.

Because I am not formally affiliated with any Chinese university or research institute during this short trip, I have had to rely on my network of personal relationships in China to obtain this type of letter. I asked a friend from the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, who I met more than four years ago, if his danwei could prepare a letter of introduction on my behalf, and he wholeheartedly agreed to do so. 

When I returned to Zhabei District Archives with this letter in hand, the archivists immediately opened up their doors; at the Shanghai Municipal Archives, my conditional access was lifted and I now am able to complete research there indefinitely.

Beyond the practical value of personal relationships in China, having a network here is also important for other reasons. In between days spent in the archives, I have made a point to connect with and meet Chinese scholars who are pursuing similar research as I am. In Shanghai, I met with faculty from East China Normal University, and in Beijing, I met professors from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Through these meetings I have learned about new sources (or better yet, many scholars often freely share PDFs of documents they’ve obtained from archives in China and elsewhere), have been encouraged to pursue certain tracks of research or research questions, and have had my opinions on Chinese history both validated and challenged. These meetings have also been extremely helpful for planning future research trips to China. My contact at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is encouraging me to come to his institute as a Visiting Scholar during my next research stint in the PRC. These meetings are also an opportunity for a bit of fun--one Peking University professor treated me to dinner, beers, and a musical performance at one of Beijing's North Korean restaurants.

With a network of contacts, colleagues, friends, and mentors in China, I have discovered that a day not spent in the archives is not necessarily a day wasted. Chinese scholars can be remarkably helpful and friendly, even to complete strangers. Networks in China are not just helpful then; they are absolutely essential.

Charles Kraus, Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Sigur Center 2013 Research Fellow
Beijing, China

I have been in Shanghai for one-week now on a research grant from the Sigur Center, and in this time I have visited four local archives in the city. My experiences at all four archives have been totally different, and none have met any of my expectations. These varying experiences have led to me to lesson number two about doing research in Shanghai: expect the unexpected. In the videos below I recap what happened at each archive and my progress on my research project so far:

On my first day I visited the Huangpu District Archive, which is located about 15 minutes walking from my hotel (it is blisteringly hot here, so certainly not a pleasant walk!). The staff was initially a bit confused about what to do with a foreigner, so they called in the boss (their “lingdao”). When I explained my research topic to the boss (I tried to make my topic as uncontroversial as possible…Chinese economic development), he was reluctant to let me access anything. He was friendly but insisted I visit the local Foreign Affairs Office and obtain approval to conduct research. When I asked where the office was located, he retreated back into his office and came back ten minutes later. Suddenly he said I could look at whatever files I wanted. I gave him a list of archival numbers and he printed some of the documents off (everything is digitized). He flipped through the pages very quickly to approve them, and then handed them over. A few of the other documents were larger so he asked that I come back in a couple of days to pick them up. I have no idea what changed when he went into his office, but I didn’t complain…

After that I went to the Jing’an District Archives, a short cab-ride away. Surprisingly, the staff, all very young and some English-speaking, had no reservations about having me do research whatsoever. They didn’t even photocopy my letter of introduction from GWU or even my passport. I gave them the archive numbers I wanted to access and a few minutes later the files had been loaded onto a computer. When I asked about printing the documents, the staff said there was no need to print because I could just download the PDFs onto my personal flash drive.

On my third day in Shanghai I went to the Zhabei District Archives. Here I was, for the most part, completely stonewalled. The Zhabei Archives is located in the same building as the District Government, and the entrance was riddled with police (there was at least one woman protesting something). The guards almost didn’t let me into the building but finally relented and escorted me to the archive. Again the staff was completely confused about what to do with a foreigner, and they were highly suspicious about what I was researching (they asked if I was conducting a “social investigation,” or basically looking into some contemporary social problem). I told them I study Chinese economic development and they eased up a bit. I showed them the archive numbers I wanted to review, and they agreed to let me have them contingent on my obtaining approval from the district foreign affairs office. They showed me the formal law governing access to Shanghai's archives by foreigners, and sure enough there is a provision that states foreigners must obtain a letter of approval from the foreign affairs office. They sent me to the foreign affairs office (thankfully just a few floors up), but the staff there was completely confused as well. After a lot of back and forth and several phone calls, the foreign affairs office decided they could not give approval but the main branch of the Shanghai Municipal Archives could…

So I took a long cab ride to the administrative headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, only to find out that the foreign affairs office had directed me to the wrong branch of the Municipal Archives. So I doubled back and went to the location on the Bund. The staff was friendly but said they never issued any such letters to the district archives. Then I asked if I could just complete research here, and they gave me a one-week access card. I will be able to get longer-term access as soon as I have a letter of introduction from a local research institution (in the works via my friend at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies), and my understanding is that this same letter will help me to get into the Zhabei District Archives as well as other archives.

The Shanghai Municipal Archives is very nice—most everything has been digitized, everything else is on microfilm. Researchers are given a computer and can access all of the digitized files via search. But printing is difficult and expensive, especially for foreigners. So research here requires time and language skills.

More to follow!

Charles Kraus, Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Sigur Center 2013 Research Fellow
Shanghai, China

When I applied for a Sigur Center Summer Grant for Asian Field Research all the way back in February 2013, my original plan was to spend one-month in Beijing, China, completing exploratory research at the Foreign Ministry Archive (外交部档案馆). Since its opening in the mid-2000s, the Foreign Ministry Archive has stood out in China as one of the most open and accessible archives in the country. By making available considerable portions of China's diplomatic record from 1949 through 1965, the Foreign Ministry Archive contributed to the rich revival of the study of Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War. Especially attractive about the Foreign Ministry Archive was its track record of providing equal access to both Chinese citizens as well as foreign nationals, truly a rare arrangement in the world of mainland Chinese archives. For these reasons, I was excited about the opportunity to spend such a length a time in Beijing and was confident that I would make progress toward developing my dissertation topic on the international history of Xinjiang Province since 1949.

However, just as soon as I learned in March 2013 that I would receive funding from the Sigur Center for this research trip, rumblings began  to emerge from colleagues in Beijing that all was not well at the Foreign Ministry Archive. Many reports, though full of rumors and speculation, suggested that the Foreign Ministry Archive had closed because a controversial document had been leaked into the wrong hands. As the calendar inched closer to my departure date, I kept prodding my friends for updates, though none contained any good news. In May I heard I was "out of luck," and just last week I was told the "archival situation is dismal." This is the hard truth about research in China: we are presented with periods of dramatic opening and then periods of startling retrenchment. Where the cycle falls when we land in China is out of our control.

With my entire research agenda and travel plans in jeopardy, however, I preemptively decided to change tact. Though I still plan to visit Beijing for one-week and will inspect the Foreign Ministry Archive first hand (once and for all separating rumor from fact), I am now spending the lion's share of my time in Shanghai. Here I hope to access the lucrative Shanghai Municipal Archives (上海市档案馆). This is still fertile ground to explore Chinese-language materials on Xinjiang’s history and to explore the connections between Xinjiang and greater China, though not necessarily the connections I initially envisaged back in February: now I will inspect the available documents on Shanghai's economic and personnel assistance lent to Xinjiang in the 1960s following the Sino-Soviet Split

Success at the Shanghai Municipal Archives is by no means certain, but I do believe there is a real opportunity here. According to the Shanghai Municipal Archives' online catalogue, there are more than one-thousand documents about Xinjiang which have been declassified. This is an astounding amount of material and more than I could hope to ever process in one-month. Moreover, municipal (as well as provincial) archives in China do not necessarily adhere to the same restrictions as the Foreign Ministry Archive. For example, while the Foreign Ministry Archive has never released any document dated beyond 1965, the Shanghai Archives have materials from the 1970s and even the 1980s. The wider date range at the Shanghai Municipal Archive could be useful in fleshing out a fuller picture of Xinjiang's history since 1949 and help me to develop additional dissertation chapter ideas.

The challenge I face, however, is that the Shanghai Municipal Archives does not necessarily have to grant me--a foreign national--access to its holdings. Local archives can open their doors to me or close them at will; it was only the Foreign Ministry Archive which did not discriminate between Chinese citizens and foreign passport holders. I have in my hands a letter of introduction from the Sigur Center as well as an additional letter from a local Chinese research institution (or, more appropriately,a work unit 单位), so hopefully I will be able to gain access and have a productive research trip after all.

The lesson from all of this is to stay flexible while researching in China. The situation in China is always changing, and past success (or failure) is by no means a barometer for future research trips. Though I initially built this research trip around the Foreign Ministry Archives, I am taking the setbacks I have encountered in stride and am doing my best to respond to them. Now I just need a bit of good luck.

With more to follow!

Charles Kraus, Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Sigur Center 2013 Research Fellow
Shanghai, China

The most dynamic city in the world’s fastest- changing nation, Shanghai is an exhilarating, ever-morphing metropolis that isn’t just living China’s dream, but is setting the pace for the rest of the world.Once a playground for foreign adventurers and socialites, the one-time whore of the Orient is now where home-grown tycoons build soaring monuments to capitalism and the locals party all night. But despite a past as evocative as it is notorious, Shanghai has dispensed with the rear-view mirror, pushed the pedal to the floor and is roaring towards its imagined future so fast that keeping up is almost impossible.

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