In villages across Zhejiang and beyond, families of Chinese volunteers who fought in the Korean War are receiving something they never expected to see again: personal letters sent from the battlefield more than seven decades ago. An academic in South Korea, a university alumni association in China and local veterans' bureaus have collaborated — often using social media and painstaking archival sleuthing — to reunite copies of these wartime family letters with descendants and senders who are still alive.
The letters were discovered in archives handled by Korean institutions and painstakingly digitised by Kim Sang-gyu, a South Korean scholar who studied at Zhejiang University and now teaches at Gongju National University. Kim has published more than 300 reproduced letters on social platforms since mid-2025 with the explicit purpose of returning them to the families named in the correspondence. His postings triggered a grassroots retrieval campaign led by the Zhejiang University alumni association and county-level veterans affairs offices.
The discoveries have produced moving reunions. In early spring, 103-year-old Wang Heqin in Kaihua county held a copy of a letter she wrote to her husband in August 1952 and had never received an answer to; records show he was killed in action in October 1952. A letter written on May 14, 1953 by 25-year-old Cheng Kezong was returned to his grandson only after researchers and alumni traced the surname, place names and faded handwriting — Cheng died on a mission the very next day and the letter was never mailed. Kim’s online postings of seven letters have so far led to six successful reunions with relatives.
The effort highlights how personal archives, transnational scholarship and civic networks can cooperate to address gaps in historical memory. The Chinese People's Volunteers (as the PRC forces were officially designated) fought during 1950–53; many soldiers were young and far from home, and families often learned of deaths only after long delays or never received a final letter. The old envelopes and yellowing note-paper that survive are thus intimate artifacts of grief, patriotism and the bureaucratic chaos of wartime.
The retrieval work is technical as well as sentimental. Handwriting has faded, place names and administrative boundaries have changed, and addresses recorded in the 1950s do not map neatly onto modern postal systems. Local veterans' bureaus and archivists have had to cross-check personnel files, casualty records and household registrations, and undertake field visits across provinces to confirm kinship. The results so far underline the role non-state actors and digital platforms can play in bridging archives and families when official channels are slow or incomplete.
Beyond the personal reunions, the project carries symbolic weight for how Sino-Korean wartime records are treated. That a South Korean scholar would curate letters from Chinese volunteers and intentionally help them 'return home' is a reminder of the tangled, human dimensions of Cold War conflict in Northeast Asia. These small acts of archival repatriation may not change geopolitics, but they reshape historical memory at the family level and provide a template for transnational cooperation over contested or fragmented records.