│  IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR YUN-HAN CHU  │  Visit Here

 

The Center for East Asia Democratic Studies was established under Professor Chu’s leadership in 2012. In 2016, he led the research team at the Center for East Asia Democratic Studies to successfully apply for funding under the Academic Summit Program of the National Science Council. This was the first project in the social sciences that received funding under the Academic Summit Program since it was launched by the National Science Council in 2009.

 

Professor Chu’s main research areas were democratization, the political economy of East Asia, and political and economic development in the Greater China region. Professor Chu previously served as a visiting associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He was elected as an Academician of Academia Sinica in July 2012 and as a Fellow of The World Academy of Science (TWAS) in 2016. He was dedicated to the promotion of survey research in the social sciences. In addition to chairing the Executive Board of the Global Barometer Surveys (GBS), he also founded the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) and set up its headquarters in Taiwan. The ABS brings together scholars from Taiwan and overseas with experience working on cross-national comparative surveys, applying an integrated research framework and standardized survey protocol to cross-national comparative survey research in East Asia. The ABS is the first cross-national research project focusing on democratization in East Asia, and is also the first cross-national research project led by East Asian scholars and the first such project led by a Taiwanese political scientist. Since the survey was first carried out in 2001, it has been expanded to cover 19 countries across the Asia-Pacific region.

 

　　Professor Chu was an exemplary teacher and a rigorous scholar with a wealth of publications. He made a significant contribution to the promotion of close cooperation between Taiwan and the international academic community. The passing of Professor Chu is a great loss to the Center and to the international social sciences community. He will be greatly missed by his colleagues and students.