The Owl That Did Not Wait Till Dusk: The Intellectual Life of Chen Shao-hsing and Taiwan Studies

Although Chen Shao-hsing’s name is well known, the academic community still holds a relatively vague understanding of his overall academic life and intellectual concerns.

 

This book attempts to fill this gap by defining Chen Shao-hsing as a son of classical sociology born in Taiwan. Apart from being a pioneer in local studies, he is also an important builder of modern social sciences in Taiwan. The content traces Chen Shao-hsing’s academic life across multiple knowledge domains, from his enlightenment in the 1920s, studying European social thought in Japan in the 1930s, returning to Taiwan in the 1940s to engage in folklore studies and participate in Taiwan’s cultural movement, to his attempts in the early post-war period to inherit the research achievements of pre-war Taiwan and engage deeply with American scholars in the 1950s, delving into fields such as demography, anthropology, and sociology. Finally, in the late 1960s, in the final stage of his life, he wrote the influential essay “The Laboratory of Chinese Social Culture: Taiwan,” addressing the unfavorable academic environment for Taiwan studies.

 

The author argues that behind Chen Shao-hsing’s seemingly divergent writings lies a common intellectual concern, which is his vision of modernity in Taiwanese society. The subsequent forgetting and remembrance of Chen Shao-hsing are also closely related to this vision. Revisiting Chen Shao-hsing’s vision not only restores the image of an important pioneer in Taiwanese social science but also helps to reflect on the development of contemporary Taiwan studies and social sciences.