Tang Tsou (1918-1999)

Shortly before leaving Honolulu for the ninety-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Atlanta, I heard the sad news that Tang Tsou , Homer J. Livingston Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Chicago, had died of heart failure on August 7, 1999.¹ As chance would have it, three of five people on our APSA conference panel had had contact with Professor Tsou, two of us rather extensively as former students of his. Tsou would have agreed with the orientation of our panel: searching out links between domestic and international politics in the present age of globalization.

Once describing himself as "a rootless scholar,"² Tang Tsou led a long, productive, and influential career as a political scientist. As a former student of Tsou's who subsequently maintained intermittent contact with him, I am sharing some observations about his aspirations, research methodology and achievements.

The range of Tsou's scholarly interests was impressive. His research foci included foreign and cross-national political institutions and behavior; elites and their oppositions; political development and modernization; values, ideologies, belief systems, and political culture; international politics; revolution and political violence; and foreign policy. With articles in Orbis, China Quarterly, Western Political Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, American Political Science Review, World Politics, and elsewhere, Tsou combined tireless work habits and analytic rigor with insistence on clear historical documentation of claims and inferences.

Tsou was born in Guangdong Province in southern China on December 10, 1918—shortly after the World War I armistice and barely five months prior to the May Fourth Movement.³ Tsou was Hakka. At one time or another, his father Tsou Lu was an elected official, military commander, finance commissioner, and college administrator. Tsou Lu co-led efforts to expel Communist Party members from the Guomindang, most notably with the resolutions passed at the Western Hills conference in 1925.⁴

In 1940, Tang Tsou earned his undergraduate degree at Southwest Associated University in Kunming.⁵ In the face of Japan's military advances in the 1930s, leading Chinese institutions of higher education fled to Kunming (not far from war-torn China's border with then-French Indochina) and collaboratively reorganized themselves. That lively intellectual milieu, Tsou would emphasize later, shaped his worldview. When Beida conferred an honorary professorship on Tsou forty-six years later, he emphasized that his "basic political viewpoint cannot be separated from the historical background of the Sino-Japanese War."⁶

After graduation, Tsou worked in the Department of Economic Research of the Central Bank of China during 1940-1941. He then left China and migrated to the United States, and was affiliated with the Republic of China's Consulate General in Chicago during 1943-1949 while earning his master's and doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago, where he held a fellowship during 1946-1947.⁷ Tsou was member of the American Political Science Association for more than four decades; while still a graduate student, his early connection with the organization is reflected in a one-line entry published in its first professional directory.⁸

Tsou's University of Chicago dissertation explicates the research and teaching of Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell. Several decades later it remains a useful, in-depth guide to the development of political science in the half-decade following the end of World War II.⁹

Relocating to a different part of the Windy City, Tsou became an instructor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and later, after moving once again, a lecturer in the External Division of the University of Utah. The latter institution published his monograph, The Embroilment over Quemoy: Mao, Chiang, and Dulles (Salt lake City: Institute of International Studies, University of Utah, 1959). In 1955, Tsou became a research associate with the Center for the Study of American Foreign and Military policy at the University of Chicago.¹⁰ As assistant professor at Chicago in 1959, Tsou won tenure in 1962 and, four years later, he was promoted to full professor. For three decades, he would teach at Chicago. Criticizing the assumptions of both sides in the "who-lost-China" debate, Tsou elaborately...