JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

ACADEMIA SINICA (ZHONGYANG YANJIUYUAN)

On the same day in April 1927 that the Guomindang (GMD Nationalist Party;) established its new government, it also decided to construct a new, centralized research academy, Academia Sinica, which was subsequently founded in June 1928. Its creators, the most prominent of whom was Cai Yuanpei (1867–1940), envisioned the new academy as an organization that would oversee and coordinate scientific as well as social scientific and humanistic research conducted in all of the Republic of China’s state-sponsored research institutes and universities, in addition to conducting research in its own institutes, to which the best and brightest of China’s academicians and independent researchers would be recruited. The intent of the new Nanjing government was to harness China’s intellectual power and put it to work whenever possible in the service of the sstructure tate.

STRUCTURE AND BUDGET

At the time of Academia Sinica’s creation there were already several smaller research institutes scattered across China’s urban centers of Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing. Academia Sinica incorporated a number of these preexisting institutions into its organization, and rapidly constructed nine institutes: meteorology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, engineering, psychology, history and philology, and sociology, most of which were located in the new capital city of Nanjing. Other institutes, such as agriculture and forestry, botany, zoology, and medicine, were planned for the future. By 1949 the academy had expanded to include thirteen institutes. Academia Sinica was not the only state-funded research institution, however, and the GMD government continued to finance research in the graduate schools of the national universities, as well as in the Beiping Research Academy and other institutes that conducted investigations in geology, agriculture, and industry. Academia Sinica was a government organ under the direct control of the Executive Yuan. Although its organic charter stipulated that it was politically independent, the government still controlled two of the most critical parts of the institution: The president of the academy was appointed by the GMD government, and the budget was appropriated by the government’s Ministry of Finance.

Academia Sinica was, however, permitted to appeal to private sources of funding as well. In 1928 the academy was granted a start-up budget of 500,000 yuan by the Nanjing government, and received a matching sum from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture. It was also awarded a monthly operating budget of 100,000 yuan, a sum that grew gradually over the next few years before leveling off. At least until the 1970s, however, the academy’s budget was always uncertain and often much smaller than necessary.

RELOCATION TO TAIWAN

When, in 1949, many academicians moved with the GMD to Taiwan, only two of Academia Sinica’s institutes, mathematics and history and philology, were able to reestablish themselves in Taiwan more or less as they had been in mainland China. Much of the equipment, resources, and personnel of the other institutes remained in China after 1949, and the process of rebuilding these institutes in Nangang, a suburb of Taibei (Taipei), lasted into the 1960s. Of the institutes and scholars that remained in China, some, particularly in the sciences, were absorbed into the Chinese Academy of Sciences created by the People’s Republic of China in 1950.

In spite of its links to the state, Academia Sinica was (and still is) theoretically autonomous. In practice, it has been compelled to respond to both direct and indirect political pressure. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, for example, the academy participated in the Republic of China’s defensive modernization program, and many members willingly contributed their time and energy to war-related research. Even in this atmosphere of cooperation, however, there were tensions between academicians and the state, especially when it came to the selection of leadership for the academy, and in 1940 academicians protested the appointment of Zhu Jiahua (1893–1963) as president of the academy on the grounds that he was too politicized. Following the move to Taiwan, however, circumstances changed. The academicians who moved with the GMD were, by and large, supporters of the party, and thus less likely to perceive government pressure as problematic. As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s the academy eagerly sought ways to shape itself to suit the needs of the state, and some of the new institutes that it created reflected this phenomenon.

In 1955 the academy established a new Institute of Ethnology, in which anthropological research on Taiwan’s aborigines could be conducted. This research was deemed by the Institute of History and Philology—which was actively engaged in the GMD state’s cultural signification project in Taiwan—to be outside the scope of its work, even though that work involved the study of archaeological materials. With the creation of the Institute of Ethnology, Taiwan’s aborigines were set apart and defined as different, exotic, primitive minorities, as juxtaposed against Han Chinese, whose customs were defined as standard. These two institutes helped with the intellectual reconstruction of Taiwan as China. Further work along these lines was conducted by the Institute of Modern History, also established in 1955, in which modern history was clearly defined as the history of modern China.

Not all of Academia Sinica’s new and reconstructed institutes served such explicitly political purposes, but they still served the needs of the state. The Institute of Botany, in which research on rice and sugar cultivation was conducted, was among the earliest institutes to be reconstructed, as were the Institutes of Zoology and Physics. Other new institutes constructed in the 1960s included an Institute of Economics, the Institute of American Culture, and the Institute of Organic Chemistry. By contrast, institutes that the GMD had found threatening on the mainland, such as the left-leaning Institute of Sociology, were not reconstructed in Taiwan. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s the academy had eagerly positioned itself to serve the GMD state, by the 1970s academicians were less enthusiastic to compromise the intellectual integrity of the institution, and for some time resisted pressure from the Legislative Yuan to establish an Institute of Three Peoples’ Principles. Similarly, in the early 1990s, the academy was resistant to Taiwanese nationalist-inspired political pressure to establish an Institute of Taiwan History, although it did so in 1993, and in so doing became the first state-sponsored research institution in Taiwan to clearly identify Taiwan as something more than a mere subset of China.

At least as important, however, have been the Academia Sinica’s contributions to the sciences. From the late 1950s on, the academy has worked with other government institutions and industry to promote industrially relevant scientific education and conduct applied research. Nangang is now home to one of Taiwan’s plethora of new science parks, this one devoted to software and biotechnology, and it is expected that the academy will collaborate with the industries that set up in that area.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chen Shiwei. Legitimizing the State: Politics and the Founding of Academia Sinica in 1927. Papers on Chinese History 6 (1997): 23–41.

Wu Dayou. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan shi chu gao [A brief history of Academia Sinica]. Taibei: Academia Sinica, 1988. *J. Megan Greene