From the University of Lincoln (UK):
An extraordinary collection of diplomatic diaries smuggled from Moscow to Paris as Communism swept across the East almost 70 years ago will be digitized and made freely available online for the first time.
The writings of Fu Bingchang (1895-1965), China’s ambassador to the USSR from 1943-49, offer a remarkable primary historical source, revealing in exceptional detail the personal tensions, rivalries and allegiances among and between world superpowers which shaped the outcome of World War II and sowed the seeds of the Cold War.
Fu was China’s signatory on the 1943 Moscow Declaration between the Allied powers (giving China the veto it still wields today) and senior representative at the first ever meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.
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This unique historical archive has for more than a decade been the focus of study for Dr Yee-Wah Foo, a political historian based at the University of Lincoln, UK, who is also Fu Bingchang’s granddaughter.
She has now received funding to digitize, translate and annotate the collection in full and make the materials freely available online. The two-year project has received a grant of 79,000 Euros from Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in a collaboration between the University of Lincoln, UK, and Academia Sinica, the national research academy of Taiwan.
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The story of Fu Bingchang’s diaries features in a special programme of BBC Radio 4’s Document series, presented by Dr Yee-Wah Foo and first broadcast at 4pm on Tuesday 19th July 2016 as part of the BBC series Cold War: Stories from the Big Freeze.
[UPDATE: Listen to the BBC Program Online]
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The full digital archive of Fu Bingchang’s collection of diaries, journals and photographs is expected to be available online from early 2017.
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