Academia Sinica

In the winter of 1948, a shipment of wooden crates arrived in Yangmei, Taoyuan, and was stacked in a warehouse beside the train station.

The crates belonged to the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica. The institute's founding director, Fu Ssu-nien, had earned the nickname "the Moving Man"¹ after transporting the entire institute's materials across wartime China—from Nanjing and Changsha all the way to Kunming in Yunnan and Lizhang in Sichuan during the anti-Japanese war. This winter shipment in 1948 was yet another relocation of the same collection. Among the crates from various government agencies that arrived in Taiwan around the same time, only those from the Institute of History and Philology remained in Yangmei; the rest were transferred to a sugar factory warehouse in Taichung².

Few people crossed the sea with the crates. Academia Sinica's own institutional history records that year with striking brevity: "Only the General Affairs Office, the Institute of History and Philology, the Institute of Mathematics, and a few other units—some fifty-odd people in total—relocated to Taiwan with the government in 1948–1949"³. Fifty-some people, a handful of units, and a borrowed warehouse: this was the first foothold in Taiwan for an institution whose charter designated it as "the highest academic research organ of the Republic of China"⁴.

30-second overview: Academia Sinica was founded in Shanghai in 1928 and arrived in Taiwan around 1949 with only fifty-odd staff members. Today it operates 24 research institutes, 9 research centers, and nearly a thousand researchers. Its legal authority derives directly from the Presidential Office Organization Act; it neither grants degrees nor admits students. The advantage of this institutional position is "duration": the Yinxu oracle bone excavations spanned fifteen campaigns over a decade, and the Institute of Taiwan History took eleven years to progress from planning to full establishment. Yet this same position also means the president is selected by the sitting president from a slate of three candidates, the annual budget is scrutinized line-by-line in the Legislative Yuan, and even whether to change the English name requires first answering "Is this a question of national positioning?"

The First Belongings to Land in Taiwan, Temporarily Stored in a Train Station Warehouse

Rewind twenty years: the institution's first meeting also did not take place in any grand hall. In 1927, the establishment of Academia Sinica was approved at a Kuomintang Central Political Conference. The Academia Sinica institutional history website attributes the initiative to a group led by Cai Yuanpei, while Wikipedia records that Li Shih-tseng presented the establishment proposal at the 74th meeting on April 17 of that year—both accounts have coexisted⁵. The Organization Act was promulgated on November 9 of the same year. On April 23, 1928, the Nationalist Government appointed Cai Yuanpei as President. On June 9, the first board meeting was held at the East Asia Hotel in Shanghai, marking the official founding⁵. A private dining room—that was the venue where the nation's highest academic institution opened its doors. According to the institutional history website, in the founding period, "with extremely limited funding, a total of ten research units were established"³.

The appointment document of April 23, 1928, naming Cai Yuanpei as President of Academia Sinica. Photographed at Cai Yuanpei's former residence in Shanghai. Photo: Mountain / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Among the luggage brought by these fifty-odd people, one thing was not packed in a box. Article 1 of the Academia Sinica Organization Act states: "This Act is enacted in accordance with Article 17 of the Organization Act of the Office of the President of the Republic of China." Article 2 states: "Academia Sinica is the highest academic research institution of the Republic of China, with the following missions: 1. Research in humanities and sciences. 2. To guide, coordinate, and encourage academic research. 3. To cultivate high-level academic research talent."⁴

Like other state-funded institutions, the National Applied Research Laboratories falls under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, while Academia Sinica's legal basis derives from the Organization Act of the Office of the President. It is not a university: it has no degree-granting authority, does not admit undergraduate students, and its researchers are not required to teach. To establish doctoral programs, it relies on the Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP), launched in 2002, jointly operated with ten universities including National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University, and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. Students receive degrees from the partner universities plus a TIGP completion certificate⁶. Today its scale is stated on its English official website: "24 research institutes and 9 research centers, with almost 1,000 researchers"⁷.

In March 1948, Academia Sinica elected its first class of Academicians, totaling 81 people, divided into 28 in mathematics and physics, 25 in biology, and 28 in humanities. The first Academician Conference was held in Nanjing in September of the same year⁸. That roster represented the pinnacle of China's academic circles at the time, but it scattered little more than a year later. Wikipedia's summary is that "most of the various units of Academia Sinica and the first class of Academicians remained on the mainland or chose to go abroad, with very few following the relocation to Taiwan"⁵. Exactly how many relocated to Taiwan varies across accounts, ranging from 6 to 12 people, with no consensus to this day. What can be confirmed is that Wang Chonghui arrived in Taiwan via Hong Kong in 1949 and died in Taipei in 1958; Wu Zhihui passed away in Taipei in 1953; and Lin Kesheng on the roster went to the United States in 1949 and never came to Taiwan⁹.

September 1948: the first class of Academicians photographed in Nanjing. Of these 81 people, only a tiny handful followed the relocation to Taiwan a little more than a year later. Photo: Author unknown / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The warehouse period did not last long. In the summer of 1954, the first buildings of the Nangang campus were completed, and the institution had its own address in Taiwan³. The second Academician Conference was held in Taipei in 1957, and the third in 1958, when the second class of Academicians was elected⁸.

The presidency also passed on. Hu Shi took office in April 1958 and on February 24, 1962, presided over the fifth Academician Conference. That afternoon, the institution held a welcome reception for newly elected Academicians including Ren Zhigong; at 6:35 p.m., he suffered a fatal heart attack at the reception¹⁰. His burial site was later developed into Hu Shi Park according to the natural topography of the area, and elderly residents in Nangang still practice tai chi there today.

Source: Academia Sinica Institutional History Website, Academia Sinica Official Press Releases, Institute of Taiwan History Overview

One Pit Yielded More Oracle Bones Than Eleven Published Catalogs Combined

The most famous items in those boxes came from Xiaotun Village in Anyang, Henan.

Between 1928 and 1937, the Institute of History and Philology conducted fifteen large-scale archaeological excavations in the Yinxu area¹¹. Fifteen excavations in ten years, by a single institution.
On June 12, 1936 (Republic of China year 25), the thirteenth excavation uncovered a pit in the western palace district of Xiaotun, cataloged as YH127¹¹. This pit yielded 17,096 inscribed oracle bones—whereas before that, the eleven published catalogs including 《Tieyu Cang Gui》 combined contained only 9,913 pieces¹². One pit produced more than the total of eleven books of records.

Eight years, twelve excavations, before reaching that one pit. This pace barely fits into the calendar of an institution that must recruit students, teach courses, and deliver results annually. Digging for eight years without finding the most important material would be marked as failure on most evaluation forms, yet it was precisely the precondition for this pit's existence.

📝 Curator's Note
The conventional explanation for Academia Sinica's achievements points to talent and funding: recruiting the best people, providing the best conditions. This explanation is not wrong, but it omits a third factor—one that the institution's structure provides. An institution that need not recruit students, need not teach courses, and receives its budget from the state rather than tuition can treat "we found nothing for ten years" as process rather than accident. Funding can buy equipment, talent can be recruited, but only "the ability to wait" is issued by the system. This is why every controversy in the sections below circles back to the same question: why is it this institution that can afford to wait.

The Institute of History and Philology research building in the Nankang campus. After the oracle bones, rubbings, and archives from Yinxu crossed the sea in the winter of 1948, they ultimately found their home here. Photo: Ahao823 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Within the same institution, another group was looking further afield. In 2011, the U.S. National Science Foundation transferred a 12-meter ALMA North American prototype telescope to "a team led by the ASIAA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)"—that is, a team jointly led by Academia Sinica's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory¹³. After modification, the telescope was relocated to Greenland, becoming the Greenland Telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) officially positions it as the only submillimeter-wave astronomical observatory in the Arctic Circle¹⁴. Academia Sinica's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics is one of thirteen member institutions of the EHT consortium; when humanity's first image of a black hole was released on April 10, 2019, one of six simultaneous global press conference locations was Taipei¹⁵.

There are also times when things move very quickly. On March 9, 2020, Academia Sinica released a press statement: Yang An-sui's research team "produced the first batch of 46 monoclonal antibodies (IgG) at milligram scale against nucleocapsid protein antigens of seven human coronavirus species in just nineteen days"¹⁶. According to Research Matters, this compressed research originally estimated to take two months into nineteen days¹⁷. The results were subsequently delivered to nine manufacturers, moving toward diagnostic test kits—among the most urgently needed items in the first year of the pandemic, and the point at which the epidemic prevention system came closest to the laboratory at that time.

On January 29, 2024, the president visited Nankang to inspect research results at Academia Sinica's Quantum Computer Thematic Center. Oracle bones, black holes, antibodies—all hanging under the same institution. Photo: Office of the President / Official Photo by Wang Yu Ching, CC BY 2.0

One pit excavated over ten years, one telescope from transfer to installation in the Arctic Circle also measured in years, one batch of antibodies made in nineteen days. Three things appearing in the same annual report might look contradictory, but they are actually three uses of the same kind of margin: because one can move slowly, there is something to produce when speed is needed. What Yang An-sui's team produced in nineteen days was the realization of "decades of accumulated results and techniques"¹⁷.

An Institution Born to Study China Begins to Study the Island It Stands On

When it was founded in 1928, this institution's mission was to study China. It took a very long time before it began to study the place where it stood.

The turning point is recorded on the Taiwan History Research Institute's history page: "In January of the 82nd year of the Republic of China (1993), Academician Chang Kuang-chih, convener of the Taiwan History Field Research Office, returned to Taiwan. Recognizing that the time had come to establish the institute, he convened relevant parties to discuss the matter of its founding."¹⁸ That same June 26, the Presidential Office approved the establishment of the Taiwan History Research Institute Preparatory Office, and on July 10, Huang Fu-san, a professor of history at National Taiwan University, was appointed director of the preparatory office. The institute was formally established on July 1, 2004, with Chuang Ying-chang as its first director.¹⁸ From preparatory office to research institute, it took eleven years.

This is another use of the same length of time: the previous one was spent on an excavation that yielded no returns for eight years; this one was spent turning an institution's research focus around—from "we study that continent" to "we study the island beneath our feet." Turning around is slower than digging, because what needs to change is the organizational structure, budget, and personnel—far slower than moving a shovel.

Academia Sinica's 2025 official image video, titled "Finding Who We Are Through Research." An institution founded in Shanghai in 1928 putting "who we are" in its promotional video's title is itself a footnote to this section.

This reorientation is also written into one person's biography. On Cao Yonghe's official academician CV, the education section contains just one line: "Graduated from Taipei Prefectural Taipei Second Middle School (1939)." The employment section reads "Adjunct Research Fellow, Institute of Sun Yat-sen Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica (1984–)," an institute whose predecessor was the Institute of Three Principles of the People.¹⁹ In 1990, he published "Another Approach to Taiwan History Research: The Concept of 'Taiwan Island History'" in issue 15 of the Taiwan History Field Research Newsletter, proposing to view this history with the island itself as the unit of analysis and the people living on it as the subject.²⁰ In 1998, he was elected as an Academician of Academia Sinica in the 22nd class.¹⁹ A person whose highest education was middle school made that list.

There is another line of inquiry that goes even further in treating this island as a subject—far enough to place it within the origins of an entire language family. The classification system widely used in linguistics, developed by Robert Blust, divides the Austronesian language family into ten major branches, nine of which have languages distributed across Taiwan. The comparative research on Austronesian languages that Academician Li Jen-kuei of the Academia Sinica Institute of Linguistics has long been conducting is built on this classification.²¹ In 2015, Chung Kuo-fang of the Academia Sinica Biodiversity Research Center served as corresponding author on a phylogeographic study of breadfruit trees published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: breadfruit trees in the Pacific are overwhelmingly dominated by haplotype cp-17, which evolved from Taiwan-endemic haplotypes cp-9 and cp-16.²² This is evidence put forward by linguistics and genetics respectively, with both the researchers and the evidence laid out in the papers. As for how these pieces of evidence should be woven into a story about ancestors, that is for the people being studied to decide—and it is the position that Indigenous language revitalization has been contesting for decades.

There is also a more recent turn. The Taiwan History Research Institute published White Memory: Oral History Records of Political Victims and Their Families, containing interviews with 29 subjects, totaling approximately 480,000 words.²³ An institution that once only studied distant lands is today compiling oral records of the wounds of this island itself.

Academician Elections Every Two Years: The System Moves Slower Than the Questions It Faces

The institutional framework evolves more slowly than awareness of the problems it creates—and this lag is written into law.

Article 5 of the Organization Act states: "Academicians of Academia Sinica shall be elected once every two years by the Academician Conference, with a maximum of forty positions per election." Article 6 requires candidates to be nominated first by universities, professional societies, research institutions, or five or more academicians and evaluators, then vetted by the Evaluation Council⁴. Article 2 of the Academician Election Regulations divides the positions into four groups, with a maximum of ten per group²⁴. Once every two years, at most forty names—a rhythm that has continued from the 1948 list of 81 to the present day.

Academician is not a job. After election, one need not relocate to Nangang to work; most continue at their original universities or overseas research institutions. The Organization Act grants academicians the authority to attend Academician Conferences, elect new academicians, and elect candidates for president—but no desk on the payroll comes with it⁴. Taiwanese treat "Academia Sinica Academician" as a rank, and that intuition is correct; the rank simply has nothing to do with whether one is employed by Academia Sinica.

💡 Did you know?
"The Nth Academician Conference" and "the Nth cohort of academicians" use two separate numbering systems, often conflated. The 1957 Taipei meeting mentioned earlier is an example: the conference was held, but no election took place—the official website's exact wording: "The 2nd Academician Conference was held in Taipei in 1957, and no academician election was held at that time. The 2nd cohort of academicians was elected at the 3rd Academician Conference in 1958" (Academia Sinica Academician Section). The same trap appears with presidents: the official list of past presidents names 10 people without numbering them by term, yet the official press release calls Chen Chien-jen the "13th President," because "term" counts by tenure count, and consecutive reelection advances the number.

The 35th election in July 2026 elected 19 new academicians and 3 honorary academicians. After the election, the total number of academicians rose to 302: 253 men and 49 women, with 18 honorary academicians²⁵. The gender composition of this cohort diverges from the overall total: of the 19 new academicians, 8 are women; all 3 honorary academicians are women, for a combined 11—the highest in history. All 4 new academicians in the Life Sciences group are women²⁶.

Source: China Times, United Daily News, Liberty Times reporting on the 35th Academician Election, July 2026

The system's temporal scale becomes inertia. Electing once every two years, with at most forty positions per election, means new members dilute the total at an inherently slow rate: the newly elected cohort is nearly half women, yet women remain only one-sixth of the total roster. No one is blocking anyone. A list accumulated over seventy-eight years naturally requires the same order of magnitude to shift.

One more point is often read as contradiction. The research institutes are organized into three divisions: Mathematical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences. Academician elections, under Article 7 of the Organization Act, are divided into four groups: Mathematical Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Life Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences⁴. The additional Engineering Sciences group was added by an amendment to the Organization Act effective January 15, 2014; the Executive Yuan's press release on the draft was direct: "Add an Academician division for 'Engineering Sciences,' revising the maximum number of academician positions to forty"²⁷. It has no corresponding research institute; engineering-field academicians are affiliated with research units under the existing three divisions. The two classification systems each serve their own purpose: one governs how physical units are organized, the other how academician positions are allocated.

Source: Academia Sinica Research Institute Organization Chart

Two additional research centers (Biomedical Translation Research Center, Critical Issues Research Center) are established across divisions and do not fall under a single division; together they make up the official website's statement of 24 institutes plus 9 centers²⁸. The Organization Act also governs how the president is selected. Article 3 states: "The President shall be elected by the Evaluation Council from among the academicians as one of three candidates, submitted to the President of the Republic for selection and appointment…. The President serves a five-year term and may be reelected for one consecutive term." The Evaluation Council comprises ex officio evaluators and 30 to 50 appointed evaluators; appointed evaluators are elected by academicians and submitted to the President of the Republic for appointment²⁹. The President's discretion is narrowed to those three names: he selects, he does not nominate. The current president, Chen Chien-jen, was appointed by President Lai Ching-te on January 2, 2026, with a term from June 21, 2026, to June 20, 2031, and took office on June 21³⁰.

For Twenty-Six Consecutive Years, One Day Open Each October

An institution that admits no students, offers no public classes, and keeps only a handful of buildings open on fixed schedules opens itself entirely once a year.

The Academia Sinica campus open house has been held annually since 1998, once each October. The official account describes it as "held consecutively for 26 years."³¹ At the 2022 event, a Central News Agency reporter documented the scene as "packed with visitors despite the rain, with an estimated ten thousand people."³² Academia Sinica Road Section 2 was congested all day, with laboratories, specimen rooms, and server rooms all conducting tours. Queues stretched from the main gate down to the base of the research building.

The Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics during the 2012 campus open day. Once a year, instruments that normally appear only in paper acknowledgments are moved onto the lawn. Photo: BreakdownDiode / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2017, Academia Sinica also launched its own science communication media outlet. Research Matters went online on April 6, 2017, its name a play on the Chinese phrase for "substance in speech," publishing research from the institution in illustrated articles accessible to general readers.³³ One year and two months after launch, it won an Excellence Award in the Government Communication category at the 11th Outstanding PR Awards.³⁴ That Taiwan's highest academic institution needed to open a separate channel to explain what it does speaks volumes about the distance between it and the public. In the same ecological niche, Taiwan's independent science communication community had already been active for years.

Some things are available every day. The Taiwan Centennial Historical Maps were developed by the GIS Thematic Center of the Humanities and Social Sciences Center, collecting multiple map layers from Japanese colonial cadastral maps (1898–1904) through recent topographic maps. Users can select and overlay two or three layers, adjust transparency, and access a mobile app and WMTS service for integration with other systems.³⁵ Anyone opening it can see what their neighborhood looked like a hundred years ago. This is the accumulated result of decades of digital archiving, laid out on a webpage.

The campus also houses two free museums: the Hu Shi Memorial Hall, comprising Hu Shi's late-life residence in Taiwan, exhibition rooms, and Hu Shi Park, open Tuesday through Saturday.³⁶ The Institute of History and Philology Historical Artifacts Exhibition Hall is open Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, offering guided tours in Chinese and English.³⁷ Groups wishing to visit can arrange tours by advance reservation. Some of the materials stacked in the Yangmei warehouse in the winter of 1948 are now displayed in the exhibition hall's cases, free to view.

The ecological pond on the Nangang campus. For residents nearby, Academia Sinica is first a place, then an institution. Photo: Lysimachi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

For Nangang residents, all of this is even more everyday. Sihfen Creek flows down from the Nangang hills and winds around the campus perimeter. Since 2011, the Taipei City Government has designated it a stream closure for fish protection—Taipei's first such closure—maintained by a community river patrol team.³⁸ In Hu Shi Park, people practice tai chi; by the ecological pond, people push strollers. What accumulates over time is unveiled once a year. The rest of the days, it remains in place as a stretch of green, a stream, a webpage.

Seen Does Not Mean Trusted

Being visible is not the same as being trusted. The same campus that people queue to enter every October is also the place that has been repeatedly asked "on what grounds?" over the past decade. The position that allows it to wait also gives it two things at once. Without teaching or recruiting students, it cannot produce ready-made metrics like student numbers and teaching hours; it can only answer "what did these funds buy?" with the research itself. Its legal authority is written into the Presidential Office Organization Act; its personnel and budget are not absorbed by any ministry, but laid before the President and the Legislative Yuan. The Legislative Yuan issues a unit budget evaluation report for it every year, commenting item by item: the 114 fiscal year report listed ten items, one of which scrutinized the newly added "Natural Gas Decarbonization Hydrogen-Fueled MW-Scale Hydrogen Blending Power Generation System Construction and Testing Plan"³⁹. Being able to wait and having to explain itself year by year, item by item, are two sides of the same position.

In March 2016, OBI Pharma's breast cancer vaccine unblinding failed to meet expectations, and the fact that then-President Chi-Huey Wong's daughter held OBI Pharma stock sparked public concern. On March 28, he requested resignation by overseas phone call; on March 29, he submitted a written resignation letter. President Ma Ying-jeou asked him to return to Taiwan first to explain; approval came only on May 10, accompanied by a letter: "Various circles hold the view that your president should resign regarding the questions raised by the OBI Pharma case—the prosecutor's questioning and search of your office"⁴⁰. Official records mark his tenure ending in May 2016⁴¹.

The judicial part needs to be split into two matters, because they are often discussed as one. The first is the corruption case. The Shilin District Prosecutors Office indicted Chi-Huey Wong and OBI Pharma board chairman Zhang Nian-tzu on January 9, 2017, under the Anti-Corruption Act. The Shilin District Court acquitted both on December 28, 2018, on the grounds that the prosecution failed to prove the parties reached a meeting of minds on the specific content of bribery. On January 21, 2019, the Shilin District Prosecutors Office announced it would not appeal; the case was finalized as acquittal⁴². The second is the insider trading case, with defendants including Zhang Nian-tzu and four others; Chi-Huey Wong was not among them. That case was decided at first instance on June 21, 2019; the appeal court upheld acquittal on January 26, 2021; the High Prosecutors Office did not appeal on February 24, 2021⁴³. The public narrative of "the OBI Pharma case dragging on for five years" splices two timelines into one.

Beyond criminal acquittal, there is another line. The Control Yuan passed an impeachment case against Chi-Huey Wong in July 2017, proposed by Control Yuan members Tang Kuei-mei, Pao Tsung-ho, Liu Te-hsun, and Wang Mei-yu. The impeachment cited three grounds, one of which pointed out that as president, he oversaw the adoption of Academia Sinica's own conflict-of-interest avoidance principles, yet led by example in violating them⁴⁴. The Disciplinary Court found him guilty of failing to accurately declare assets and failing to disclose his daughter's receipt of OBI Pharma stock, and imposed a reprimand. After the reprimand, two paths diverged. Chi-Huey Wong himself filed three requests for retrial, all rejected. On April 6, 2022, the Control Yuan that originally proposed his impeachment filed a retrial request on his behalf with the Disciplinary Court—this matter has not yielded a public outcome to this day⁴⁵.

Another publicly handled case within the institution is an academic ethics matter. Portions of papers by Chen Ching-shih, a specially appointed research fellow at the Institute of Biochemistry, were found to be fabricated after investigation. Academia Sinica published an investigation report on March 30, 2018, and announced disciplinary action on January 17, 2020: ineligibility to apply for or participate in any academic activities and research projects within the institution for ten years, prohibition from using institutional academic administrative resources, and recovery of related awards totaling NT$1.86 million⁴⁶. This case differs from the OBI Pharma case in that it was an internal procedure the institution itself identified and completed; the public record contains no documentation of his objection or appeal.

📝 Curator's Note
Public memory's resolution of this matter stops at the 2016–2017 frame. "Academia Sinica President Indicted" entered everyone's mind; "January 21, 2019, Acquittal Finalized" did not. This is not malice, merely the physics of news cycles: the indictment day had images, searches, resignation; the acquittal day had only a decision not to appeal. An institution that uses ten years to conduct one research project; the public forms an impression in two weeks, and that impression stays in place unmoved. An institution that trades "length" for results is, in matters of reputation, defined by the shortest unit of time.

The land line moves more slowly. The National Biotechnology Research Park was built on the site of the former Nangang 202 Munitions Factory, occupying only one corner of the land. In May 2010, writer Chang Hsiao-feng knelt before President Ma Ying-jeou in front of reporters, requesting preservation of the old trees and ponds there; the originally scheduled June 1 groundbreaking was halted by the Executive Yuan⁴⁷. On June 10, 2011, environmental review passed conditionally, with conditions including green building certification and environmental education facility accreditation⁴⁸. The park opened on October 15, 2018, eight years after the kneeling. Today the park's official website states it is "committed to maintaining a 14.19-hectare ecological protection area and reconstructing a 4-hectare early Sanchongpu wetland restoration area"⁴⁹. Public Television's documentary Our Island records "25 hectares of land, with actual development area of 9.6 hectares"⁵⁰.

Looking inside the institution, there is a different sense of time. Postdoctoral researchers' appointments are in principle for two years; upon completion, reapplication is required, with a maximum total of four years. Applicants must submit within six years of obtaining a doctorate and must first obtain consent from an Academia Sinica researcher to serve as academic advisor; annual research funds are capped at NT$500,000⁵¹. An institution that can spend ten years excavating one archaeological site gives its most junior researchers a time scale of two-year terms, maximum four years.

Going down another layer, the sense of time differs again. In July 2022, a telephone interviewer (pseudonym "A-hsiang") at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences' Survey Research Division told media that the center had for years contracted with part-time telephone interviewers without providing labor insurance under the Labor Standards Act; employees had to bear labor insurance, 6% labor pension contributions, and health insurance themselves. The background she described was: in 2006, under President Lee Yuan-tseh, a meeting decided to grant telephone survey specialists labor insurance benefits; in 2014, an institutional affairs meeting resolved to adopt a contracting system instead. At that time, nearly 15 telephone interviewers were preparing to seek compensation from the institution for overtime and unpaid pension contributions. The center's response was: "Our center is actively addressing this... and will do its utmost to consider their interests and handle the matter appropriately and legally."⁵² After this statement, the matter has not received public follow-up.

The name is another line that has not been completed in four years. On March 9, 2020, legislator Fan Yun raised questions in the Legislative Yuan and submitted an emergency proposal, demanding that Academia Sinica devise a plan to change its English name within three months and report to the Legislative Yuan, on the grounds that "Academia Sinica" on English Google searches redirects to the Chinese Academy of Sciences⁵³. Then-President James C. Liao responded on the spot: "Academia Sinica's name involves national positioning and policy; it is not something Academia Sinica can change unilaterally," and "discussion can be opened, but it is not easy to make a unilateral decision"⁵³. In March 2024, Academia Sinica's Secretary-General Tseng Kuo-hsiang told media: "This 'shelving' resolution represents the view of the majority of Academia Sinica members that there is no need for Academia Sinica to change its name."⁵⁴ Civil society's Free Society suggested the English name be changed to National Academy of Taiwan⁵⁵.

After the presidential appointment was finalized on January 2, 2026, there were also voices in the Legislative Yuan. KMT legislator Wan Mei-ling raised concerns by name about generational succession: "Academia Sinica's three most recent presidents... all took office at age fifty-eight, yet now Chen Chien-jen, who is about to turn seventy-five, is taking the position, which may run counter to 'forward-looking, generational succession' practice"—Lee Yuan-tseh, Chi-Huey Wong, and James C. Liao were indeed all fifty-eight when they took office. Fellow KMT legislator Lee Yen-hsiu believed Chen Chien-jen's academic standing and administrative experience were sufficient for the role, but "Chen Chien-jen's future challenge remains 'political'"⁵⁶. Being repeatedly asked "on what grounds?" is also running on a yearly scale: the OBI Pharma case from indictment to finalization took two years, the 202 site from kneeling to opening took eight years, the name from proposal to shelving took four years.

⚠️ Contested Perspective
National Taiwan University professor and Academia Sinica academician Chen Pei-jer argues that Academia Sinica should be "virtualized," or even that its continued existence itself should be reconsidered. His reasoning is: this institution was founded in the early Republic of China era and belongs to a system left over from the authoritarian period; it receives stable government funding and abundant resources, yet still competes with major universities for National Science and Technology Council research funds, creating an uneven starting line. He advocates preserving the academician honor while returning research functions to national universities. One phrase in his original remarks is "Academia Sinica should still be abolished!"; he also criticized Chen Chien-jen and outgoing President James C. Liao for lacking "moral integrity in facing power" (Storm Media reprint of China Times interview). In another interview, he placed the president's identity after the question of existence itself, believing the latter is what Taiwan's society and academic community should discuss more⁵⁷. Public voices speaking to the level of "existence" are currently concentrated in him alone. The sense of relative deprivation from the university sector—"on what grounds is it the one that can wait"—has always existed, yet lacks a named representative voice, which makes this fault line appear smaller on the surface than it actually is.

A Place That Can Make Decades a Unit of Planning

In the winter of 1948, stacked in a warehouse in Yangmei were dozens of boxes and more than fifty people. From there to today's twenty-four research institutes in Nangang, nine research centers, and nearly a thousand researchers, seventy-eight years have passed.

What was gained in that span of time is a luxury: the ability to make "decades" the unit of a single research plan. The Yinxu excavations lasted ten years, the Institute of Taiwan History spent eleven years in preparation, and evidence for Austronesian language families stretched from linguistics all the way to the 2015 breadfruit paper. The way to buy this length of time is to place yourself in a position that requires no teaching, no student recruitment, and whose legal foundation is written directly into the Presidential Office Organization Act. That same position lets its president be selected by the President from three names, lets its budget be itemized and reviewed line by line in the Legislative Yuan each year, and even requires it to answer questions about national identity before changing its English name. The ability to wait, and the necessity of constantly answering "on what grounds"—they are two sides of the same design.

On that Saturday in October, crowds still walk through the gate on Research Academy Road Section 2. For the remaining three hundred-plus days, the facilities open on fixed schedules, and group tours require advance reservation. Most of what is happening behind that gate will not be judged for its worth until years later—and whether it is worth it, in the end, is decided by those who walk through.

Further Reading

• Taiwan White Terror — The oral history records that Academia Sinica's Institute of Taiwan History is organizing today document this period of history.
• Taiwan's Higher Education Expansion and Institutional Closure — The other half of "why should it be the one that can wait," which requires looking at the resource situation from the university side.
• Taiwan Design Research Institute — Another state-funded institution; what it can accomplish differs greatly depending on whether it operates under a ministry or directly under the Office of the President.
• PanSci — Before "Research and You," science communication in Taiwan was pioneered by the private sector.
• The Intersection of Taiwan Indigenous Education and Language Revitalization — Who researches and who narrates the evidence of Austronesian languages are two different questions.

Image Sources

All images in this article are cached in public/article-images/society/ and do not hotlink to source servers:

• Ahao823 — CC BY-SA 4.0
• Author unknown, photographed 1948 — Public domain
• Mountain — Public domain
• Ahao823 — CC BY-SA 4.0
• Office of the President / Official Photo by Wang Yu Ching — CC BY 2.0
• BreakdownDiode — CC BY-SA 4.0
• Lysimachi — CC BY-SA 4.0

References