Anatol Klass

Anatol Klass is a doctoral candidate in the history department at UC Berkeley. His dissertation focuses on the campus experiences and subsequent careers of students in the Diplomacy Department at the Central Political Institute (zhongyang zhengzhi xuexiao), the Kuomintang's party school for civil service training. His research follows these young bureaucrats from the classroom into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as they encountered new theories of international politics and then attempted to realize those ideas by transforming the institutions and practices of Chinese diplomacy. Although party school students were trained by the KMT, many of them stayed in Mainland China after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Anatol's dissertation traces the parallel careers of these former classmates on either side of the Taiwan Strait during the first decades of the Cold War as they put their shared training into practice in two very different political contexts. Anatol conducted the research for this project as a Fulbright fellow in Taiwan and has also written for a general audience in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and SupChina.