[KS] Hong Yung Lee (1939-2017)

[Berkeley Center for Korean Studies]

*Hong Yung Lee (1939-2017)*

* The Center for Korean Studies community was saddened to learn of the
death on October 24th of Professor Hong Yung Lee
<http://ieas.berkeley.edu/faculty/lee.html>. Professor Lee was on the UC
Berkeley faculty for nearly thirty years, and among his many
responsibilities and accomplishments, he served as the CKS Chair for ten
years. A celebration of Hong Yung Lee's life and career will be held on
January 21, 2018, at UC Berkeley. Professor John Lie, also a previous CKS
Chair and Hong Yung Lee's colleague for many years, offered the following
brief summary of his life and work:*

Hong Yung Lee came of age during a turbulent period in Korean history. Born
in colonial Korea in 1939, his childhood was marked by political events
triumphant and tragic: from Liberation in 1945 to the Korean War (1950-53).
He came of age during the rule of Syngman Rhee – widely perceived to be
corrupt and ineffectual – and it is not altogether surprising that his
initial choice of career was journalism, which he studied at Yonsei
University. A committed nationalist and democrat – anti-colonial, or
anti-Japanese, sentiments and anti-communist convictions would be
consistent benchmarks in his life – his search for truth and ideals would
take him to the study of political science.

At the University of Chicago, Lee worked with Tang Tsou, under whose
tutelage he would write his dissertation on one of the defining political
phenomena of the 1960s: the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Politics of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution – Lee’s Ph.D. dissertation that was revised
during two years of post-doctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley (1973-75) –
proved to be a permanent contribution to our understanding of Chinese
politics in general and the Cultural Revolution in particular. Harnessing
data sources, such as the Red Guard newspaper, Lee provided a foundational
and granular analysis of the Cultural Revolution that had been occluded to
the outside world.

After spending nearly a decade at Yale University, Lee returned to UC
Berkeley. In his three decades as a tenured professor, he taught a
generation of students about the politics of East Asia, especially China
and Korea. His legion of Ph.D. students could be found at major
universities around the world, but his pedagogical legacy was most notable
in South Korea where many of his students became major scholars in their
own right. He also chaired the Center for Korean Studies for a decade.
Amidst his ever-escalating academic demands across the Pacific, he
published a major monograph in 1991: From Revolutionary Cadres to Party
Technocrats in Socialist China. It was a massively detailed analysis of the
transformation of erstwhile revolutionaries into routinized bureaucrats, a
product of massive and exhaustive research.

In the last quarter-century of his life, Lee worked steadily on his magnum
opus: a comparative study of East Asian politics and culture. He sought to
uncover the fundamental institutional frameworks of three major societies:
China, Korea, and Japan. Although left unpublished, the manuscript was
complete and will undoubtedly appear posthumously. Beyond his major
synthesis, he worked widely and voraciously on numerous topics on East
Asian politics, ranging from the study of North Korea to that of colonial
Korea. The level of scholarly productivity is impressive especially given
that he suffered frequent bouts of ill health in the last decade of his
life.

Lee was, like almost all of us, a product of his upbringing. Given that he
grew up in an era when political debates were matters of life and death, he
could be exceedingly serious and polemical: heated exchanges were part and
parcel of his intellectual and ideological convictions. Yet over three
decades in Berkeley – undoubtedly facilitated by the downfall of his bête
noire, communism - did mellow him: he was often warm and charming to
colleagues and students. He took great pride not only in the
political-economic successes of South Korea but also remained devoted to
and celebrated UC Berkeley, especially the Institute of East Asian Studies,
Center for Chinese Studies, and Center for Korean Studies, and the wider
community of Asian Studies scholars and students. He was an outstanding
scholar, devoted teacher, and esteemed colleague at his beloved UC Berkeley.

Lee is survived by his wife, Whakyung, his daughter Sunyoung, and her
husband Duncan Williams.

JOHN LIE
C.K. Cho Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley


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