From Cambridge to San Diego: Crossing Cold War boundaries in the Chinese Collections
Posted:
19 Jun 2026
Ian Dubrowsky travelled from University of California San Diego, to spend five weeks researching the Chinese Collections at Cambridge University Library. From uncovering global networks hidden within industrial records to finding a working community among the stacks, Ian reflects on his time as the 2026 WongAvery Visiting Scholar.
When I arrived at Cambridge University Library in March for five weeks as the 2026 WongAvery Visiting Scholar, I thought I was coming to sharpen a national history. Five weeks at Cambridge turned that story into a global one.
My dissertation examines the Daqing Oilfield, the flagship industrial project of Maoist China, discovered in 1959 and mythologised as proof that the country could build a modern economy on its own terms. It also examines the 1960 Laobaidong coal mine disaster, which killed more than six hundred workers and was buried from the historical record for nearly three decades.
I had spent years tracing how one industrial site became a site of national celebration while another became a site of official silence, and I understood the project as a story about China: its workers, its state, and its habits of memory and forgetting.
“I’m interested in the factory floor, the mines, the oilfields, the steelworks. I’m interested in understanding these industrial spaces as social and politically constructed zones.
Instances of death, injury, and disaster provide a window into Chinese industrial governance through the present.”
The Chinese collections at Cambridge University Library hold a remarkable range of bibliographic catalogues documenting Cold War-era technical and industrial material. Read carefully, these sources reveal not only what Chinese engineers and cadres were doing, but what they were reading, citing, translating, and arguing with. What I had approached as domestic sources turned out to be documents in conversation with the world.
Seen from Cambridge, Chinese industry in the Mao era was embedded in circuits of technical knowledge that crossed the Sino-Soviet split, the Cold War blocs, and the supposed isolation of the 1960s and 1970s in ways that standard periodisations obscure.
Information flowed. Expertise travelled. The oilfield I had been studying as a Chinese place was, in its very construction, a node in a much larger network.
The archival record at Cambridge, combined with the British state’s own mid-century reporting on Chinese industry held at the National Archives at Kew, made that network legible in a way it simply had not been from San Diego.
This is the kind of shift that only happens in certain archives. It required sitting in a reading room for weeks, working through materials not catalogued as “global” or “transnational” but which reveal themselves as such when read side by side.
It required having a librarian who could point me toward what I did not yet know I needed. In Dr Yan He, Head of the Chinese Section at Cambridge University Library, I had exactly that. Her knowledge of the collections is matched only by her generosity in sharing it, and conversations with her over the course of the residency reshaped my sense of what the archive could do.
The Needham Research Institute, where John Moffett hosted me with extraordinary warmth and care, opened further dimensions of the same story: the scientific and technical channels through which Chinese industrial knowledge circulated internationally in a period when it was not supposed to be circulating at all.
The Churchill Archives and the National Archives at Kew rounded out the picture from the other side, allowing me to read British observations of Chinese industry against the Chinese record itself—two vantage points that sometimes agreed, sometimes diverged sharply, and were always productive to hold together.
The dissertation I will write in the coming year is a stronger project because of the five weeks I spent here. It remains centred on Daqing and Laobaidong, and on labour, disaster, and memory in Mao-era China. But it argues, with evidence it did not previously have, that the history of Chinese industry cannot be told as a purely national history.
The flows of information, expertise, and comparison that shaped what happened in the oilfields and mines ran through archives on three continents, and writing honestly about Chinese industrial modernity means following those flows wherever they lead.
Cambridge gave me the sources that made that argument possible, and the colleagues who helped me see them for what they were.
The scholarly community I encountered here is the part of the residency I will carry with me the longest.
I came expecting to find sources. I found a working community—one whose generosity is not, I think, fully captured by anything I will write in a footnote, and which I hope to remain part of for a long time.
The WongAvery Scholar Exchange placed me in sustained conversation with historians, social scientists, and librarians across Cambridge whose questions and criticisms improved the project at every turn. The Library’s staff made the archives feel navigable rather than overwhelming. The programme’s coordinators and the University Library Research Institute met every logistical question with patience and care.
The archive of modern Chinese industry is scattered across the world, and the work of assembling it is necessarily collective. Five weeks ago I understood that abstractly. I understand it now as a practice, and as a gift.
The WongAvery Visiting Scholar Exchange Programme is generously supported by the Avery-Tsui Foundation, in collaboration with Cambridge University Library, UC San Diego Library and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Original story by Cambridge University Library. Photos by Lizzie Woodman / Cambridge University Library.