University Debates Chance at $3 Million

A Taiwan foundation’s offer of $3 million for a center for Chinese studies is stirring controversy at the University of California.

At issue is the politically ticklish condition that the recipients name the center after the late Chiang Ching-kuo, son of former Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek and a controversial figure in his own right.

Few are willing to speak publicly. But during a 2 1/2-hour meeting this week, faculty members debated whether the money was worth the potential political baggage.

“The only thing that was clear was that we were going to meet again,” said Wen-hsin Yeh, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley.

The controversy comes at a time when Taiwan--regarded as a renegade province by China--has taken an increasing role in funding research about China conducted in the United States.

The $3 million is being offered by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. At least four universities have been invited to apply.

UC Berkeley officials learned of the competition for the $3 million after using the foundation as a conduit for $15 million in already promised funds from UC alumni in Taiwan. That money is to go to an East Asian studies library.

Chiang Ching-kuo, who died in 1988, is known as the man who lifted martial law in Taiwan. But he also is associated with the authoritarian regime of his father.

Chiang’s name made headlines in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1980s when Taiwan-born writer Henry Liu was shot to death at his Daly City home after writing a critical biography of him. Two Taiwan gang members were convicted of murdering Liu on the orders of Taiwan’s former military intelligence chief, Vice Adm. Wong Hsi-ling. The Taiwan government maintained that Wong was acting on his own.

Yeh said naming something for a political figure is always a sensitive issue that “in this particular case, given the complex dimensions in Chiang Ching-kuo’s career, becomes a matter of even greater difficulty for all of us.”

At a Monday night meeting, faculty members “agonized over it. We talked left and right, up and down,” she said.

Eventually, the faculty decided to go ahead with a draft proposal for a Chiang Ching-kuo Center for Chinese Humanistic Research. That passed by a vote that Yeh said was unanimous, “but I wouldn’t call it enthusiastic.”

Problems arose when published reports detailed concerns from unnamed China experts about the political fallout. Some also worried that the $15 million already pledged could be in jeopardy.

UC Berkeley officials insist that the $3-million gift and the $15 million in promised funds are separate. C.D. Mote, the UC Berkeley official in charge of fund-raising, said the only reason the foundation was used was as a tax convenience. UC had planned to open its own nonprofit agency in Taiwan, but found that would be a lengthy process and accepted an offer of help from the foundation, he said.

For the past four or five years, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation worked through the New York-based American Council of Learned Societies. But council President Stanley Katz said the foundation recently decided to go it alone.

Some scholars worry that relying on international funding compromises academic independence.

In an incident that did not involve the foundation, Taiwan sources pulled $450,000 from the University of Michigan this year after political scientist Kenneth Lieberthal signed a statement reminding the U.S. government that its primary relationship was with China, not Taiwan.

“That was a very unfortunate mixing of politics with an academic program,” Lieberthal said.

D. Gale Johnson, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies, said questions have been raised not only about international funding of China research, but also about money coming in from Korea and Japan for research on those countries.

Johnson said he has an answer for the critics. “Find some money somewhere else for us,” he said. “Other sources of money have pretty much dried up.”

Johnson said scholars at the University of Chicago will meet Monday to decide whether to compete for the $3-million gift.

As at Berkeley, the name issue is expected to be a sticking point.

“I think there’s a problem with naming something permanently or even temporarily after a major political figure. I think that’s mainly the issue,” Johnson said.

At Berkeley, Yeh said she wasn’t sure how crucial the naming issue was to getting the money. She said the representation was that the foundation wanted Chiang’s name attached to something with some degree of “institutional permanence.”

Yeh said her current core budget is about $200,000 a year, so the $3 million would mean “things that we have never been able to do in the past . . . such as faculty travel, graduate student travel, graduate fellowships.”