Snaring intellectual victory from the jaws of adversity has been a life-long trait of Lee Teng-hui, his Cornell University colleagues recall.
"Lee is not a man you are about to push around," Bernard F. Stanton, Cornell professor emeritus of agricultural economics, once said in a Cornell Chronicle interview. He had Lee as a student for one of his courses. "His great strength was in his intellectual capacity and his ideas. He was very serious, and he came to Cornell with specific ideas on what he wanted to accomplish with his thesis. His command of English was average, but he possessed an excellent mind. He was always correct, polite and a diligent worker."
Lee, called "T.H." by his professors, was "older than most of the graduate students, very reserved, and not an extrovert or a politician," said Kenneth L. Robinson, Cornell professor emeritus of agricultural economics. Robinson was a member of the committee that examined Lee's doctoral research. "He was very able and very conscientious."
"You wouldn't find many people at Cornell who knew him socially," said Daniel G. Sisler, Cornell professor of agricultural economics. "He wouldn't be out playing volleyball with other graduate students or down at a bar in Collegetown. He was very quiet, very studious and personally dedicated to his work and to Taiwan. I gave him an A-plus in a course on research methods, and I don't give out many A's."
Joseph H. Chen, Ph.D., Cornell senior research associate of food science, was a friend of Lee's. In fact, Lee stood up for Chen and his bride, Mei-Hsi, at their wedding. During Lee's political ascendency, he and Chen lost touch. Chen explained in a Voice of America interview in 1992 that he called on Lee on a visit home to Taiwan in 1978, just prior to departing for the United States.
"I was unable to call Lee directly, but instead I went through a messenger. I was very surprised to have received a return call from Mrs. Lee that evening," Chen said. On the next trip to Taiwan, the Chens and the Lees did in fact arrange to meet. "From this you can see that Mr. Lee doesn't forget his old friends. As busy as he was as president of his country, he didn't forget his old friends."
Lee learned to play golf at Cornell's Robert Trent Jones Golf Course. "In golf, if your first stroke is not good, it would be hard to do well on the second and the third strokes," Chen said. "Mr. Lee understood this very well, therefore he took his first stroke very seriously. From this you can see that he deals with problems at their root and pays great attention to detail."
Lee lived on State Street in downtown Ithaca, in a section where many graduate and older students still live.
Lee studied agricultural economics at Cornell for three years beginning in September 1965 and received his Ph.D. in June 1968, when he was 45 years old. His doctoral thesis concerned transfers between rural and urban areas of income and capital investments on Taiwan from 1895 to 1960. The American Agricultural Economics Association selected it as the outstanding dissertation of 1968. Later, it was published as a book by the Cornell University Press.
Before arriving at Cornell, Lee had developed a strong academic base. In high school, throughout the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, he was one of four Chinese students in a class filled with Japanese. He ascended through the educational ranks and gained admittance to the prestigious Kyoto Imperial University in Japan, then later studied agricultural economics at National Taiwan University. For his master's degree, Lee went to Iowa State University.
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