Ambrose King

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Ambrose Yeo-chi King (Chinese: 金耀基) (born 14 February 1935) is a sociologist in Hong Kong and was formerly the vice-chancellor of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Research focus and contributions
4 Some of his work
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Personal life

He was born in 1935 with family root in Zhejiang. He received most of his education in Taiwan. He graduated from Taipei Municipal Chenggong Senior High School, earned a B.A from National Taiwan University and M.A. degree in political studies from National Chengchi University. Then he went to U.S. and received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970.

[edit] Career

After earning his PhD, he joined the Department of Sociology of CUHK in 1970. In 1974, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer, in 1979 to Reader and in 1983 Professor of Sociology in CUHK. From 1977 to 1985, he served as Head of New Asia College and in 1989 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the university before succeeding Arthur Li. In 2002 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of CUHK, and retired in 2004. He is now a Professor of Sociology in the CUHK, teaching the course Individual and Society.

In addition to his teaching, research and academic administration, Prof. Ambrose King also delights in penning beautiful and profoundly literary essays. Cambridge Musings (1977), Heidelberg Musings (1986), and Ever in my Heart (2005) are his literary creations. Recently, he has been enthralled by calligraphy, pursuing the traditional literati spirit and refreshment for the mind in brush, ink and paper.

[edit] Research focus and contributions

His research interest are modernization and modernity of China, and the role of tradition in social-cultural transformation. He employed the theoretical framework of Max Weber to study the development of Chinese culture in the process of modernization, giving his attention to the subsequent course that Chinese culture might take as she sloughed off the old society. He also tried to find out the cost and success of modernization after the break-down of the old Chinese dynastic order and clan system starting from the late 19 century. He thought that each of the two cultures, East and West, have their strengths and weaknesses, and Chinese should try to understand Western culture in order to reconcile the contradictions and tensions between East and West and build up a pluralistic world where different cultures co-exist in harmony.

Besides, he wrote various theses on Hong Kong society, including The Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong (1975), Social Life and Development in Hong Kong (1985), The Special Character of Hong Kong’s Polity and its Democratic Prospects (1987), One Country, Two Systems: An Idea on Trial (1995), and Hong Kong: A City with the Most Traits of Modernity in Chinese Societies (2000). He held that in order to understand Hong Kong, one cannot overlook two important threads, namely, colonial rule and capitalism. He is famous for the administrative absorption politics model (行政吸納政治) he introduced in 1975.

He has also visited Cambridge University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. When he visited Cambridge University in 1975, he wrote his first essay on university education, entitled Two Cultures and Technological Humanism. He pointed out that, in an atmosphere where there was interaction between different cultures and fields of study, the unique internal spirit and external dynamism can better manifest themselves. In 1983 he published The Idea of a University, a work that was the fruit of many years of reflection and study.

In 1994, he was elected a Fellow of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and in the following years he has been honoured by many universities.

[edit] Some of his work

"The Idea of University" (大學之理念), 2001, OUP
"Chinese Politics and Culture" (中國政治與文化), 1997, OUP
"State Confucianism and Its Transformation: The Restructuring of the State-Society Relation in Taiwan." and "The Transformation of Confucianism in the Post-Confucian Era: The Emergence of Rationalistic Traditionalism in Hong Kong."
in "Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity", 1996, edited by Tu Wei-ming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
"Chinese Society and Culture" (中國社會與文化), 1992, OUP
"From Traditional to Modernised" (從傳統到現代), 1992, OUP

An excerpt of King's article "Traditional Chinese Society" (中國的傳統社會), published in the book From Tradition to Modern Era is adopted as a suggested reading material for Paper 2 (Questions on Culture) of the subject, Chinese Language and Culture, an AS-level subject in the Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination, held by the HKEAA.