The Chinese collection consists of approximately 350,000 volumes, plus another 28,300 reels of microfilm. The collection deals with politics, law, economics, public finance, sociology, statistics, education, and defense. Other emphases include historical and geographical works, language and literature, and science and technology, including both industry and agriculture. An unusually comprehensive set of some 13,000 serials (of which over 1,300 are currently received) includes many pre-1949 government documents, statistical reports on commerce, and other periodicals.

The collection's rich resources on the history of the Chinese Communist Party are represented in two bibliographies by Xue Jundu: The Chinese Communist Movement, 1921-1937 (1960) and The Chinese Communist Movement, 1937-1949 (1962). Others are cataloged in Hoover Institution Microfilms (1965) and its Asian Supplement (1977), which lists 128 microfilm reels describing communist base areas during the Chinese civil war.

Republican China's hasty adoption of Western educational reforms resulted in student activism demanding political and legal reforms. John Israel's The Chinese Student Movement, 1927-1937 (Hoover Institution Press, 1959) cites many Hoover materials that refer to these events.

Other collection strengths include organized labor, rural markets, railroads, urban banks, and the leasing and renting of land in villages (see G. William Skinner and Winston Hsieh, eds., Modern Chinese Society: An Analytical Bibliography. Publications in Chinese, 1644-1969, Stanford University Press, 1973).

Reference contact and recommending library purchases

For reference help with the Chinese collection or to suggest a Chinese-language title for purchase, please contact: