History and Mission
The Academia Sinica was founded in mainland China in 1928 by the Guomindang Nationalist Government, its first meeting being held at Shanghai's famous East Asia Restaurant. Its first president was Cai Yuanpei, succeeded by Zhu Jiahua in 1940. It shares the same root and the same Latin name with current Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. After Chinese Civil War, Academia Sinica was re-established in Taipei following relocation of the ROC government from Nanjing to Taipei. Unlike the mainland Chinese counterpart, which is exclusively composed of institutes in the natural sciences, Taiwan's Academia Sinica covers three major academic divisions:
- Mathematics and Physical Sciences
- Life Sciences
- Humanities and Social Sciences.
The academy was envisioned as an organization that would oversee and coordinate scientific, social science, and humanistic research in all of the Republic of China's state-sponsored research institutes and universities. Unlike other government-sponsored research institutes which are responsible to relevant Executive Yuan ministries, Academia Sinica, as the nation's premier research institution, is directly responsible to the President of the Republic of China. Thus Academia Sinica enjoys autonomy in formulating its own research objectives. In addition to academic research on various subjects in the sciences and humanities, Academia Sinica's major tasks also include providing guidelines, channels of coordination, and incentives with a view to raising academic standards in the country.
At the time of Academia Sinica's founding there were already a number of other, smaller institutes in several Chinese cities. Academia Sinica incorporated a number of these into its organization, and rapidly built nine institutes: meteorology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, engineering, psychology, history and philology, and sociology, most of which were located in the new capital city of Nanjing.
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