About

Academician Hu Fu (courtesy name Sheng-hsi), whose family came from Yangzhou, Jiangsu, was a towering figure in political science in the Chinese-speaking world and an Academician of Academia Sinica. He graduated from the Department of Law at National Taiwan University, pursued graduate study at Emory University in the United States, and was a visiting scholar at Yale University. After returning from Yale he pioneered the behavioural-science approach in Taiwan, leading a survey study of Taipei's Neihu District in 1976 and, from the 1980s onward, large-scale empirical survey analyses of major elections, political culture and value change. He built a cross-university team that surveyed democratic transition and political-cultural change at regular intervals, and led the NTU research workshop into collaborations with Columbia University, Duke University, the University of California, Los Angeles and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, establishing Taiwan as a hub of global research on democratization and political culture.

With selfless and fearless moral courage he exemplified virtue, scholarship and service. His lasting contributions to empirical political research, to the building of a democratic culture and to the mentoring of younger scholars are held in the highest esteem.

For more on his life, see the Hu Fu memorial website.

Academician Yun-han Chu was an Academician of Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University, and the most internationally influential political scientist Taiwan has produced. He devoted his career to survey research and the study of democratization, and did more than anyone to bring Taiwan's empirical political science onto the world stage. As a student he joined Academician Hu Fu's Workshop on Political Systems and Change, founded in 1976, and under martial law helped pioneer the survey study of elections and political culture in Taiwan. With international colleagues he completed the first scientific nationwide random-sample survey in mainland China, and in 1996 he co-founded the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), formally connecting Taiwan to cross-national survey research. In response to the third wave of democratization he founded the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) in 2004, the first large cross-national research programme led by Taiwanese scholars, covering 21 Asian countries and more than half of the world's population and recognised by UNESCO and other leading international bodies. He went on to bring the regional networks of the continents together in the Global Barometer Survey (GBS), expanded this research capacity into the Hu Fu Center for East Asia Democratic Studies, and built a comparative database spanning 97 countries: an irreplaceable public good for scholarship worldwide.

For more on his life, see the Yun-han Chu memorial website.