Thomas Hong-Chi Lee


Thomas Hong-Chi Lee is a Taiwanese-American historian of Chinese education and related aspects of traditional Chinese culture. He has taught world history and early modern European intellectual history in the US, as well as in Taiwan and in China.

Early life and education

Lee was born in Tainan, Taiwan. After graduating from National Tainan First Senior High School in 1962, he studied electrical engineering at National Cheng Kung University, but transferred to National Taiwan University in 1964 to study history. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1968, he completed doctoral studies in the United States, earning his Ph.D. in history in 1974 from Yale University, where he worked mainly with Arthur F. Wright, but also took courses from Jonathan Spence, Franklin L. Baumer, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Peter Gay. His doctoral dissertation was titled, "Education in northern Sung China".

Career

He taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from 1974 to 1991. After 1991 he taught at the City College of New York, and the Graduate Center, both of The City University of New York until he took an early retirement to return to Taiwan. He served as a visiting professor in Taiwan, China, and Germany, and has given lectures in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, as well as the US and Taiwan. He retired from National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan in 2015.

Publications

His major publications include two books on Chinese education, each on the Song dynasty, and on traditional China. Both are in English and then translated into Chinese. The Chinese version of the latter has been awarded the “Outstanding Achievement in Sinology” Prize and then “Wenjin" Prize of the National Library of China. This work is also widely circulated in Japan, where he has been acclaimed as “The first person today in the scholarship of Chinese education and examinations.”
Lee has also published on Song Chinese historical thought and on Sino-European cultural relations, as well as many articles in academic journals. After retirement in 2015, he has been writing as a public intellectual, and has given three Lecture Series on modern European thought in the prestigious TSMC Foundation Lecture Series in Taiwan. His essays on contemporary intellectual matters in Taiwan and China are regularly featured in Alumni Bimonthly of National Taiwan University and in the web-journal, Voicettank.org.

Chinese publications

  • 華東師範大學. 2017 ISBN 9787567532656.

As translator