Paul Lin Ta-kuang
| Paul Lin Ta-kuang | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 14, 1920 Vancouver, British Columbia |
| Died | July 4, 2004 (aged 84) |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan Harvard University |
| Occupation | Political scientist, Peace Activist |
| Children | Christopher (1945-1966) Douglas (1949-, aged 66) |
| Parent(s) | George Lim Yuen (Lin Zuoran) (1882-1967) Chiu Mon Som (1882-1938) |
| Relatives | David 林達偉 (brother) Andrew 林達文 (brother, married Pearl Sun Sui Ying 孫穗英 (1922-), Sun Yat-sen's granddaughter) |
Paul Lin Ta-kuang (simplified Chinese: 林达光; traditional Chinese: 林達光; pinyin: Lín Dáguāng; Wade–Giles: Lin Ta-kuang (March 14, 1920 – July 4, 2004) was a Canadian-Chinese political scientist and peace activist, the founding Director of McGill’s Center for East Asian Studies (1965-1982) and Rector of the University of East Asia in Macau (now Macau University) from 1986 to 1988.
Son of George Lim Yuen (Lin Zuoran 林佐然) (1882-1967) and Chiu Mon Som 趙文琛 (1882-1938); marries Eileen Siu-Tsung Chen (1924-) 陳恕. They had two sons, Christopher 林凱 (1945-1966) and Douglas 林潮 (1949-).
His father was an Anglican clergyman, the first Chinese to become one in Canada. He had two brothers: David 林達威 (1915-) and Andrew 林達文 (1917-). David became an important doctor; he married Florence Hsi 席與萱, daughter of financier Xi Debing 席德柄 (1892-) and was a close friend of Sun Ke 孫科 (1891-1973), son of Sun Yatsen 孫中山. Andrew married Sun Ke’s daughter, Pearl Sun (1922-). Paul was close to the Sun family, and to the politically prominent widow of Sun Yatsen, Madame Soong Ching-ling 宋慶齡 (1893–1981), also through his wife Eileen, whose father Chen Xing 陳行 (1890-1953) was the right hand of T. V. Soong or Soong Tzu-wen 宋子文(1891-1971), Soong Ching-ling’s brother.
He attended the University of British Columbia (UBC) for one year (1938–39) and then moved to the United States.
He entered the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1939 to study engineering, but soon found out that “his academic interests lay elsewhere, in International law “which could be used to defend China’s interests”; he graduated in this field in 1943. At Ann Arbor he engaged in public speaking, winning the first prize at the 1942 Northern Oratorical League with a speech supporting Chinese war effort against Japan. He also became a member of the Chinese Students’ Christian Association (CSCA), then the oldest and most influential Chinese Student Group in America, which was becoming growingly politicized due to the pressure of the Sino-Japanese War. He would become the Association’s president in 1944. By that time he had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and at Harvard. With the end of the war against Japan, as China descended into Civil War between Nationalists and Communists, the CSCA became more and more critical of the Nationalist regime and of American support of it against Communism. Feeling the increasingly hostile political climate in the United States he decided to move to China with his family in 1949, before finishing his dissertation at Harvard. In 1951 the CSCA was disbanded and restraining orders prohibited most Chinese students to return to the PRC.
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