Above: Linghu Pu (right) and his wife, Ma Huiyuan, in 1945.
Linghu Pu (1910–2000) was a high-ranking Nationalist official in Shanxi Province in North China from 1945 to 1949. Born into a family of Shanxi merchants, Linghu Pu aspired to be a politician. He studied political science and law at Zhongguo University in Beijing from 1933 to 1937, where he emerged as a student leader of the Leftist movement. During the Sino-Japanese war (1937–45), he served in the Nationalist army and on the provincial executive committee of the Chinese Nationalist party (Kuomintang) in Shanxi after the Japanese surrendered. After the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, he took up residence in Shanxi, where he died in 2000.
Linghu Pu’s life spans almost the entire twentieth-century, the most tumultuous one in the modern Chinese history, having witnessed the collapse of the Qing imperial dynasty, the subsequent competition of the two major political powers in China (the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists), and the Communist victory in 1949 and its subsequent dominance of China. Because Linghu Pu was a well-educated intellectual and a high-ranking Nationalist Party official, his personal papers are an extraordinary collection, shedding light on the intellectual history and political history of twentieth-century China. The collection reveals the rivalries between the Nationalists and Communists, between the Nationalists and the regional warlords, and the Communist victory in 1949 and its rule of China thereafter. The papers thus provide a comprehensive coverage of modern China’s political, social, and cultural history.
The collection, kindly donated to the Hoover Archives by Ling Huping, a daughter of Linghu Pu and a Hoover visiting fellow, includes photos, diaries, confession papers, official files and certificates, the family genealogies of Linghu Pu and his wife, Ma Huiyuan, and oral history interviews of Linghu and Ma.
