The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has recently acquired increments of the collection of T. V. Soong, one of the most influential and prominent politicians of twentieth-century China. Born into a wealthy Christian family in Shanghai in 1894, son of Charlie Soong and a brother to the eminent Soong sisters (who all married politically prominent men—H. H. Kung, Sun Yat-sen, and Chiang Kai-shek), T. V. Soong began his political career serving as Sun Yat-sen’s private secretary in 1923. After Chiang Kai-shek completed the Northern Expedition—the 1926 military campaign launched by the Kuomintang (KMT) against the Beiyang government—Soong joined the KMT-led Nationalist government, serving as minister of finance, governor of the Central Bank of China, and acting premier of the Nationalist government. After the war broke out between China and Japan in 1937, Soong was assigned to Washington, DC, as Chiang Kai-shek’s personal representative to the US government. Immediately after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Chiang appointed Soong (who remained in Washington) minister of foreign affairs to manage China’s alliance with the United States and Great Britain. Soong became premier of the Nationalist government in late 1944. In spring 1945, he led the Chinese delegation to the first United Nations Conference in San Francisco, where he was one of the meeting’s four cochairmen. Soong left the premiership in March 1947 and later served in his last official post as governor of Guangdong Province. After the defeat of the Nationalists to the Chinese Communists in 1949, Soong moved to New York, where he lived a quiet life until his passing, in 1971.
The Hoover Archives acquired the T. V. Soong papers in 1973, with increments received in 2004 and 2006. In spring 2024, Michael Feng, the grandson of T. V. Soong, generously donated additional increments, which include valuable historical materials related to Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary campaign in the 1920s, correspondence between Soong and Chiang Kai-shek and other top leaders of Nationalist China, and rare photos and news clippings regarding Soong’s activities in the United States and China. The increments will enrich Hoover’s archival holdings on modern China and will broaden knowledge of the complicated history of Chinese politics and the relations between the United States and China during World War II.
