Man-houng Lin

Man-houng Lin (Chinese: 林滿紅) is a highly regarded economic historian, becoming the first woman president of the Academia Historica (國史館), and one of the few female historians to boldly argue in public about Taiwan's sovereignty and international status.^[1]

Biography

Born in Taiwan in 1951, she graduated from National Taiwan University and later received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 1989. Lin has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica since 1990 and Professor at the Department of History, National Taiwan Normal University since 1991. From May 20, 2008 to December 15, 2010, she served as the president of the Academia Historica, the central academy of history of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Her appointment marked the first time a woman had headed the institute since its founding in 1947.

She resigned because of the institute's hosting of a controversial online poll, which listed Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping among the candidates for the Top 100 most influential figures in the Republic of China's hundred-year history.^[2]

Lin’s research primarily focuses on treaty ports and modern China, opium in late Qing China, currency crisis in early nineteenth-century China, and various empires and the role of Taiwanese merchants in East Asian overseas economic networks.

Lin comes from the same native place of Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂).

She has published five books and some 70 papers in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean.^[3] Her book China Upside Down links China’s topsy-turvy change from the center of the East Asian order to its modern tragedy with the Latin American Independence Movement.^[4]

Notes

1. "Lin Man-houng: Gentle Woman, Tenacious Historian". December 2008.
2. Low, Y.F. (17 December 2010). "China Times: A correct historical perspective". CNA English News. Archived from the original on 2010-12-17. Retrieved 18 December 2010.
3. listed at http://www.drnh.gov.tw/www/page/english/a01.htm
4. Lin, Man-houng (2006). China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]: Harvard Univ. Asia Center. ISBN 9780674022683.