| Thomas Hong-Chi Lee | |||||||||||
| Birth Date: | 5 March 1945 | ||||||||||
| Birth Place: | Taiwan | ||||||||||
| Citizenship: | American | ||||||||||
| Fields: | Chinese history | ||||||||||
| Workplaces: | City College of New York | ||||||||||
| Alma Mater: | Yale University (PhD) | ||||||||||
| Doctoral Advisor: | Arthur F. Wright | ||||||||||
| Academic Advisors: | Jonathan Spence | ||||||||||
| Spouse: | Nina Lee | ||||||||||
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Thomas Hong-Chi Lee (; born March 5, 1945) is a Taiwanese-American historian of Chinese education and related aspects of traditional Chinese culture. He has taught world history and early modern European intellectual history in the US, as well as in Taiwan and in China.
Lee was born in Taiwan and was educated at National Tainan First Senior High School and then National Taiwan University (1964–68). He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he worked mainly with Arthur F. Wright, but also took courses from Jonathan Spence, Franklin L. Baumer, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Peter Gay, writing a Ph.D. thesis on education in Northern Song China (960–1126).
He taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, from 1974 to 1991. After 1991 he taught at The City College of New York, and the Graduate Center, both of The City University of New York until he took an early retirement to return to Taiwan (in 2007). He served as a visiting professor in Taiwan, China, and Germany, and has given lectures in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, as well as the US and Taiwan.[1] He retired from National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan in 2015.[2]
His major publications include two books on Chinese education, each on the Song dynasty, and on traditional China (from the first millennium BCE to the 17th century CE). Both are in English and then translated into Chinese. The Chinese version of the latter has been awarded the “Outstanding Achievement in Sinology” Prize (2015) and then “Wenjin" Prize of the National Library of China (2017). This work is also widely circulated in Japan, where he has been acclaimed as “The first person today in the scholarship of Chinese education and examinations.”[3]
Lee has also published on Song Chinese historical thought and on Sino-European cultural relations, as well as many articles in academic journals. After retirement in 2015, he has been writing as a public intellectual, and has given three Lecture Series on modern European thought in the prestigious TSMC Foundation Lecture Series (2014, 2015 and 2017) in Taiwan. His essays on contemporary intellectual matters in Taiwan and China are regularly featured in Alumni Bimonthly of National Taiwan University and in the web-journal, Voicettank.org (思想坦克).