The Named Chair System: The Donation Lineage of the Wei Lun, Choh-Ming Li and Lee Quo Wei Professorships

This is a factual archive entry for the Reference Zone (08 Finances). Each claim carries its source; no credibility badges are used. For an overview of the named-chair system see 08-finances/finances.md; for background on the donor families behind CUHK's later colleges see 08-finances/new-college-donor-families.md. Living persons are treated briefly and without personal judgement.

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The bottom line: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)'s named professorship system rests on the endowed professorship scheme launched in 1993^※, and has grown over three decades into three distinct strands: the Wei Lun Professorships endowed through the Wei Lun Foundation; the Choh-Ming Li Professorships, an internal honour named after the University's founding Vice-Chancellor; and more than fifteen specialist chairs named after individual philanthropists or families. Together they weave private charity, institutional memory and academic distinction into a distinctive system of recognition.

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# Why does CUHK have named chairs?

Endowed and named professorships are among the most important fundraising tools of the modern research university. For a donor, the reward is permanence: a named chair keeps the donor's name — or the name of someone they wish to honour — attached to a professorship in perpetuity. For the university, the chair brings extra resources to attract or retain leading scholars, easing reliance on recurrent government funding.

According to CUHK's Office of Institutional Advancement^※, the University's donation-funded professorship scheme was formally launched in 1993. The design is flexible: donors may fund an external visiting scholar for a semester or a full academic year, or support the research activities of an existing CUHK academic, and "a Chair may be named after the donor or any person designated by the donor." This institutional arrangement created a durable "exchange channel" between financial giving and academic honour.

On top of this, CUHK has established two further categories of professorship, both University-led and both named after historical figures — the Choh-Ming Li and Wei Lun Professorships. These are conferred by the University on existing academics of outstanding merit, through internal selection, and thus complement the externally funded named chairs. The three strands are examined separately below.

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# The Wei Lun Professorships: Dr Lee Quo-wei and the Foundation's four decades of giving

# Who was Lee Quo-wei?

Dr the Honourable Lee Quo-wei, GBM, JP (1918–2013), whose name in Cantonese is 利国伟 ("Lee Quo-wei", also romanised "Li Kuo-wei" in Mandarin), was born in Macau to a family from Kaiping, Guangdong. He is one of the pivotal figures in Hong Kong's post-war financial history. According to the English Wikipedia entry for "Lee Quo-wei"^※ and CUHK's official obituary^※, he joined Hang Seng Bank in 1946, rose through its directorships, and served as Executive Chairman from 1983 until his retirement in 1996, a term in which he steered the bank through a steady recovery after the 1986 stock-market crash. He subsequently served as Honorary Chairman and Honorary Senior Adviser. According to the official obituary, his service to Hang Seng Bank spanned more than six decades.

Lee also held numerous public roles: he sat on Hong Kong's Executive and Legislative Councils, was the first Chairman of the Board of Education, and served as an adviser on Hong Kong affairs; in 1997 he was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal. In education circles he is remembered as a key participant in the overall planning of Hong Kong's education system.

# The Wei Lun Foundation and CUHK: from founding involvement to named chairs

According to the official obituary and the citation for Mrs Lee Yick Hoi-lun Helen at CUHK's 84th Congregation^※, Lee's connection with CUHK goes back to the University's very foundation: he was the founding Treasurer, and served as Chairman of the University Council from 1982 to 1997 — 34 years of Council service in total. Under his stewardship, the obituary records, CUHK grew rapidly into one of Hong Kong's leading institutions of higher education.

In 1989, Lee and his wife, Mrs Helen Lee (李易开麟), jointly established the Wei Lun Foundation Limited. According to the honorary-degree citation for Mrs Lee, the Foundation's foremost concern is education: it has "made generous donations to universities in Hong Kong, tertiary institutions on the mainland, and over 70 schools, and supported medical, infrastructure and cultural projects on the mainland." CUHK has been among the Foundation's principal beneficiaries.

According to the official obituary^※, Lee, personally and through the Wei Lun Foundation, established the "Wei Lun Foundation Endowment Fund" at CUHK, supporting projects that include:

• the Wei Lun Visiting Professorship Programme, which brings internationally renowned scholars to CUHK to give lectures;
• a series of Wei Lun Professorships across multiple disciplines;
• the Lee Quo Wei Professor of Neurology — a specialist chair bearing his personal name.

# The Wei Lun Professorship: mechanism and recent appointees

The Wei Lun Professorship is one of CUHK's highest honorary professorships for existing academic staff, on a par with the Choh-Ming Li Professorship and conferred periodically by the University. According to a 2025 CUHK Communications and Public Relations Office press release^※, a new batch of Choh-Ming Li and Wei Lun Professors was installed at the inauguration ceremony held on 4 March 2025.

Recent Wei Lun Professors with documented appointments include:

The CUHK official obituary reads in the original: 「Dr Lee personally made very generous donations to establish the Wei Lun Foundation Endowment Fund to support many academic and research programmes of the University, including setting up the Wei Lun Visiting Professorship Programme, the Wei Lun Professorships in various disciplines and the Lee Quo Wei Professorship of Neurology.」 — that is, the Wei Lun professorship system as a whole was founded on Lee's personal generosity and that of his Foundation.

Lee died at the Prince of Wales Hospital on 10 August 2013, aged 95. His widow, Mrs Helen Lee, succeeded him as Chairman of the Wei Lun Foundation, and the Foundation's educational work continues to this day.

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# The Choh-Ming Li Professorships: an internal honour named after the founding Vice-Chancellor

# Li Choh-ming and the founding of CUHK

Li Choh-ming (李卓敏, 1912–1991) is the single most important figure in CUHK's institutional history. According to the English Wikipedia entry for "Li Choh-ming"^※, he was born in Guangzhou and took economics degrees at Nankai University and the University of California, Berkeley, earning his doctorate in 1936; he then served at Berkeley as a professor in the business school and as director of its Center for Chinese Studies.

In 1963, Li was charged with founding The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Berkeley granted him an extraordinary ten-year leave of absence without pay, allowing him to devote himself fully to the founding venture. He became CUHK's first Vice-Chancellor (in office 1964–1978) — and simultaneously Hong Kong's first Chinese university head. Under his leadership, CUHK awarded its first batch of bachelor's degrees in 1964 and, in 1966, established Hong Kong's first postgraduate research programme. He held fast to the four-year undergraduate system and championed the principle that "research is the soul of a university," setting the academic direction for the University for decades to come. Li died in 1991.

# The Choh-Ming Li Professorship: created 2013, an honour for distinction

The Choh-Ming Li Professorship was first conferred on 17 October 2013 — CUHK's 73rd Congregation and Foundation Day — in memory of the scholar who founded the University. According to a CUHK press release^※:

「This new professorship is named after the late Dr Choh-Ming Li, a distinguished scholar and the founding Vice-Chancellor of The Chinese University of Hong Kong who laid the solid foundation of the University in its early years.」

This professorship is awarded through internal University selection and conferral — it is not driven by external donation. Recipients must show "a sustained record of excellence in teaching and research and outstanding contributions to their Faculty and the University." Each receives a five-year term with corresponding research funding, in recognition of the achievements of serving academics.

The first cohort (2013) comprised 11 Choh-Ming Li Professors. Per the CUHK Newsletter^※, the fields covered were:

Since then, CUHK has held an inauguration ceremony for new Choh-Ming Li (and Wei Lun) Professors annually or biennially. According to faculty announcements, current Choh-Ming Li Professors are to be found across the Faculties of Arts (Chinese Language and Literature), Engineering (Mechanical and Automation Engineering; Computer Science and Engineering), Science (Mathematics; Life Sciences), Medicine (Orthopaedics and Traumatology), and Social Science (Geography and Resource Management; Sociology), among many other disciplines.

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# The Lee Quo Wei Professor of Neurology and other endowed named chairs

# The Lee Quo Wei Professorship: a specialist chair bearing his personal name

Beyond the Wei Lun professorship series, Lee Quo-wei also established a specialist chair named after his own Chinese name: the Lee Quo Wei Professor of Neurology (利国伟神经科学讲座教授). According to CUHK's Office of Institutional Advancement named-chair page^※, this chair coexists with the series supported by the Wei Lun Foundation — the former named for a person, the latter for the Foundation — reflecting a deliberate two-pronged structure in Lee's giving to CUHK. The chair is held by the Faculty of Medicine; the current appointee's home department is the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics.

# A survey of CUHK's existing endowed named chairs

According to CUHK's Office of Institutional Advancement named-chair page^※, as of the research date of this article (20 June 2026), the endowed named professorships established at CUHK include (in part):

Note: the chair titles listed here were compiled from official web pages at the research date and may change with new donations; for some chairs, the donation amount and year of establishment are not publicly documented and are therefore not listed.

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# The Li Ka Shing Foundation: the largest single medical-chair donation

Among the chairs surveyed above, the Li Ka Shing Foundation's giving is the most substantial in scale. According to the Foundation's official press release^※, on 31 August 2005 it donated HK$100 million to CUHK. Over 80% of the sum went to interdisciplinary research at the University's Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences; the remainder funded the first Li Ka Shing Professorship, whose inaugural appointee was Professor Y.M. Dennis Lo, then director of the Institute, with the title "Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine." (The full story of his subsequent presidency and research career appears at faculty-and-leaders.md.)

According to a subsequent CUHK announcement^※, in 2007 the Foundation donated again, adding a second Li Ka Shing Professorship with a gift of HK$20 million; the inaugural appointee was cell biologist Professor Hsiao-chang Chan. Together, the two chair donations constitute one of the largest publicly documented single-foundation commitments to CUHK chairs since the endowed professorship scheme was launched in 1993.

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# Money into honour: the institutional logic of named chairs

# How do the three categories differ?

CUHK's named-chair system can be broadly divided into three types, each with a distinct logic:

Together the three types form CUHK's institutional system of recognising "academic achievement": the externally endowed chairs keep a donor's name attached to a discipline in perpetuity, while the honorary chairs are continually renewed through periodic inauguration ceremonies, refreshing their symbolic meaning.

# How does a donation become academic authority?

Viewed financially, an endowed chair typically works like this: the donor contributes a principal sum (the endowment); the principal is invested conservatively; and each year the investment return (interest and dividends) pays for the appointee's research support and administrative costs. As CUHK's Office of Institutional Advancement^※ puts it, "Your generous support will enable CUHK to advance its mission of higher education, sustainably and in perpetuity" — and "in perpetuity" is precisely the crux of the endowment mechanism: the principal is never spent, so the chair exists, in principle, forever.

The same mechanism appeals to donors: the naming right binds a philanthropist's name, or the name of someone they wish to honour, to the academic prestige of a leading university for the long term. Having served 34 years as Chairman of the Council, Lee Quo-wei chose to establish chairs across multiple disciplines under the "Wei Lun" Foundation banner — an act that was both a return on his long years of service and a piece of institutional design for extending influence.

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# The Wei Lun Scholarships: an extension of the philanthropic thread

Lee Quo-wei's and the Wei Lun Foundation's giving to CUHK extends beyond professorial chairs. According to a CUHK press release^※, on 20 September 2012 the Foundation, on behalf of Mr and Mrs Lee, donated HK$30 million to establish the 「Lee Quo Wei CUHK Golden Jubilee Scholarship Endowment Fund」 (利国伟中大金禧奖学金捐赠基金), marking CUHK's fiftieth anniversary. The Fund's annual investment return supports:

• full scholarships for outstanding non-local students from underdeveloped provinces of mainland China;
• annual grants of HK$300,000 each to the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine;
• scholarships for undergraduate exchange programmes for students with financial need.

The scholarships have been awarded since the 2013–14 academic year. With matching support from the government's Matching Grant Scheme, the educational impact of this HK$30 million gift will continue to unfold over decades.

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