Joseph Esherick (University of California-San Diego) began the workshop with his keynote lecture, “1943: China at the Crossroads.” Based on a newly edited volume authored by a dozen scholars, Esherick’s lecture featured many collections from the Hoover Institution Archives, including the personal papers of T .V. Soong, H. H. Kung, Joseph Stilwell, and Albert Wedemeyer; the personal diaries of Chiang Kai-shek; and the KMT Party Archives. Esherick explained how the Communists in China, who, at the beginning of World War II, were a ragtag band of survivors of the disastrous Long March holed up in the caves of Yan’an, had developed into in an army of a million men by the end of the war; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, by contrast, was increasingly viewed as an inept, corrupt, self-serving authoritarian regime.
