Anatol Klass

Bio

Anatol Klass is the Hou Family Predoctoral Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation focuses on 130 students who graduated from the Foreign Affairs Department of the Central Political Institute (中央政治學校), the Kuomintang’s Party School for civil service training, during the 1930s. At the Party School, these bureaucrats’ education was shaped by both the Kuomintang’s Leninist revolutionary tradition and emerging notions of technocratic governance. Although Party School students were trained by the Nationalists, many of them stayed in China after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Klass’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. Klass has also written for a general audience in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, ChinaFile, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Research Interests: Comparative State Building, History of Taiwan, Foreign Policy, Diplomatic Professionalization, Cold War History.