A Clash of Founding Visions: Ch'ien Mu, Vice-Chancellor Li Choh-ming, and the 1965 Resignation

⚠️ This article belongs to the unofficial-history module (13 Campus Governance and Reform). It sets out, with attribution, the differing founding visions documented in multiple sources, presenting each account as reported rather than adjudicating between them. The scholars involved (Ch'ien Mu, Li Choh-ming, Tang Chun-i and others) are all deceased; they are named according to public historical records. This article focuses on the divergence in educational philosophy and the personnel departures that followed, which complements the institutional-level story of "centralisation vs autonomy" told in The Fulton Reform.

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# 1. From Allies to Opponents: A Neglected Backstory

It is tempting to picture the Ch'ien Mu–Li Choh-ming split as a clash between two men who were always at odds. The historical record suggests something more intriguing: in the early days of organising CUHK, Ch'ien Mu was in fact among Li Choh-ming's supporters.

• Ch'ien Mu: founder of New Asia College (for the college's founding history, see 10-colleges/new-asia-college.md). According to the New Asia College entry^※, he founded the college in Hong Kong in 1949 (initially as the Asia College of Arts and Commerce; reorganised and renamed in March 1950, when it moved into its campus on Kweilin Street, Sham Shui Po, Kowloon). He devoted some sixteen years to building the institution, and served as the intellectual leader of the scholars who had come south from mainland China, taking the preservation and reconstruction of Chinese culture as his educational mission.
• Li Choh-ming (1912–1991): according to the English Wikipedia^※, CUHK's founding Vice-Chancellor (in post, per the source, from February 1964 to September 1978). An economist by training, he had taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Hong Kong, and brought considerable international academic standing and administrative experience.

According to the Chinese Wikipedia and related historical material^※, Ch'ien Mu was among those who pressed for a Chinese vice-chancellor and who supported Li Choh-ming's appointment as the first incumbent — a fact often buried by the later narrative of opposition. In other words, the two were not natural enemies: Ch'ien Mu had strong hopes for Chinese leadership of the University and welcomed Li's appointment. Yet once the three colleges were federated into a university, the cracks in their educational visions gradually widened, and eventually broke the alliance apart.

Setting out this backstory is necessary to dispel an overly melodramatic reading. The Ch'ien Mu–Li Choh-ming divergence was not a case of conflict at first sight, but a tension that grew, within a shared enterprise, out of fundamentally different answers to the question "what should this university be?"

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# 2. The Philosophical Divergence: A "Distinctive" vs an "Ordinary" Chinese University

According to the compiled historical material^※ and CUHK's official "Master's Profile: Ch'ien Mu" page^※, the core of the disagreement can be summarised as two rival answers to the question "what should this university be?":

As accounts of Ch'ien Mu's vision have it: Ch'ien Mu wanted to found a "distinctive Chinese cultural university" — one that would absorb Western culture into the main body of Chinese culture, making the University a stronghold for carrying forward and promoting Chinese culture. The subject-status of Chinese culture was the heart of Ch'ien Mu's educational ideal. This was continuous with the educational mission he had set for New Asia College — "reaching back to the spirit of the Song-Ming academies, reaching sideways to the Western European tutorial system" — a humanistic education meant to mediate between Chinese and Western culture.

As accounts of Li Choh-ming's vision have it: Li Choh-ming leaned instead toward an "ordinary Chinese university" (that is, a modern, comprehensive university with a Chinese-majority student body), emphasising modern institutional governance aligned with international norms, efficiency and academic standards, rather than treating a "cultural mission" as the sole purpose.

This divergence was not mere personal pique; it was a collision of two conceptions of the university: one treats the university as a vessel for cultural transmission (Ch'ien Mu); the other treats it as an institution for modern knowledge production (Li Choh-ming). Both conceptions are legitimate, yet they resist full reconciliation within the governance of a single university — particularly when resources, academic structures and authority all had to be centrally arranged, the "culture-first" and "modern-institution-first" positions clashed on almost every concrete decision.

Tellingly, in 1967 Vice-Chancellor Li Choh-ming himself formally articulated CUHK's mission as "combining tradition with modernity, and bringing together China and the West" — a formulation that in fact embraced both culture and modernity. The divergence is thus better understood as turning on "which element was primary, and how it should be realised in day-to-day governance," rather than as outright opposition. This museum presents both accounts side by side, from their respective sources, without ruling on which was "right."

According to a Sohu compilation of Li Choh-ming's life^※, Li himself once gave the University a self-description that has often been quoted: "The Chinese University of Hong Kong will not be a British university, nor a Chinese university, nor an American university. It is to become an international university." Read alongside Ch'ien Mu's "distinctive Chinese cultural university," the contours of the disagreement become clearer: Ch'ien Mu's anchor was the subject-status of Chinese culture, while Li Choh-ming's was the higher-order frame of "the international," within which Chinese culture was one constitutive element rather than the sole purpose.

Scholarship offers observations independent of the two men's own retellings. Some studies situate the founding and operation of New Asia College within the context of "the rise of cultural nationalism in Hong Kong," arguing that New Asia's emphasis on a humanistic general education — in which "the well-rounded person matters more than the specialist" — was itself a cultural response by the southbound scholars to the particular time and place of postwar Hong Kong, rather than a mere pedagogical preference. This provides additional background for understanding why Ch'ien Mu was so sensitive to bureaucratic decision-making in which "a show of hands settles it."

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# 3. Two Biographies Side by Side: From Background to Governing Style

Placing the two men's careers side by side may explain the divergence better than any abstract debate over ideas — the two arrived at the same university from almost entirely different intellectual traditions and professional trajectories:

This comparison is not meant to suggest that one man "prevailed" over the other. Ch'ien Mu built his college from a refugee-camp-style campus on Kweilin Street; Li Choh-ming was recruited by the government to lead an institution within an established framework. Their situations are not simply comparable. Set side by side, the table is meant to show that this was not a private grudge between two incompatible temperaments, but two educational paths that were almost bound to meet — and almost bound to grate — at the level of governance. That is also why this article opens the timeline of Vice-Chancellors' governance struggles with the two men side by side: Li Choh-ming's "foundational centralisation" was set in motion precisely by this clash with Ch'ien Mu.

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# 4. A Key Institutional Detail: Weekly Inter-College Meetings and Voting by Show of Hands

One crucial institutional mechanism — easily overlooked — turned the clash of ideas into a question of who stayed and who left: the inter-college meetings of the three college heads.

According to the account compiled by Confucian China^※ and related historical material^※:

• After Li Choh-ming took office, the heads of New Asia, Chung Chi and United Colleges met once a week;
• According to this account, "when opinions differed, the matter was put to a show of hands, passed on the spot, with no opportunity for further discussion";
• Under this "one college, one vote; minority yields to majority" mechanism, once New Asia's position lost a vote, there was little room for appeal.

The procedure looked neutral and efficient, but for Ch'ien Mu it was a structural defeat: his "New Asia spirit" and cultural ideals, once they failed to convince the other two colleges, were voted down, one "passed on the spot" after another. According to this account, Ch'ien Mu felt he was "drifting ever further from his educational ideal," watching the "New Asia spirit" gradually degenerate until "nothing matched the ideals of manhood he had always held."

This is the crucial point at which the "clash of ideas" became a "clash of governance": the disagreement was not over abstract slogans but played out in a meeting room, once a week, settled by a show of hands. When cultural ideals had to submit to majority vote, and the vote allowed "no opportunity for further discussion," the side that held to its ideals had only two options — compromise, or leave. This institutional tension is the early manifestation of the same structural contradiction described in The Fulton Reform as "college autonomy vs centralisation."

# An Interlude to Handle with Care: The Question of Scholarly Lineage

Around this period, accounts also circulate concerning academic schools and allegiances. According to the Confucian China article^※, some commentators attribute Ch'ien Mu's departure in part to differing views among New Asia's own teachers and friends over "scholarly lineage and succession" — one view valuing the continuity of a particular master–disciple genealogy, while Ch'ien Mu held that "learning is open to anyone; why must it be divided into schools and sects?"

This matter touches on private friendships and disagreements among the founding scholars, and rests largely on one-sided retellings in which motives are difficult to verify. This museum records, from its sources, that "differences over scholarly lineage did exist," but neither adopts nor repeats any innuendo of "sidelining" or "settling scores" among named scholars — there is no reliable archival evidence for such claims, and they would run against this museum's principle of "recording the events, presenting the accounts, without imputing motives." The scholars in question are all deceased; such verdicts are best left to historians working from fuller archives. Reliability note: this passage rests on a single source and is recorded as one account among others.

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# 5. Repeated Attempts to Leave: The Long Resignation, 1962–1965

Ch'ien Mu's departure was not a single decision but a tug-of-war lasting more than three years, in which he sought to resign three times. According to a Sohu compilation of Ch'ien Mu's New Asia history^※ and an account by The Paper^※, the process can be traced through four milestones:

The very rhythm of "three attempts to leave" is itself a fact worth noting: it shows that Ch'ien Mu's departure was not a sudden impulse or a reaction to a single event, but a course weighed and reweighed, wavered over, and ultimately not talked out of, over more than three years. According to this account, Ch'ien Mu wrote to a friend that "in New Asia I have been living a great nightmare" — though, it should be noted, the remark referred, per the account, to changes within New Asia itself, not to CUHK as a whole or to Li Choh-ming personally; readers should be careful not to over-read it. Reliability note: this detail rests on second-hand retelling and is recorded as one account.

On the final resignation itself, China News Service^※ and Confucian China^※ recount a detail that has been widely circulated:

According to these accounts, when Ch'ien Mu submitted his resignation, he was told: if he "resigned," the unpaid salary owed since New Asia's founding could not be paid out; if he "retired," he would not only collect the back salary but also receive a retirement gratuity of "several hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars." Ch'ien Mu, however, preferred to forgo the gratuity and insisted on leaving by "resignation" rather than "retirement," as a mark of principle.

This choice — forgoing a pension to resign — has been read by many commentators as a gloss on Ch'ien Mu's character and convictions: what he wanted was not an honourable exit package, but the act of "resigning" itself, as a statement of his disagreement with the direction the institution was taking.

A necessary note of caution: the specific figure of "several hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars" in retirement benefits and the details of the exchange rest mainly on second-hand accounts (memoirs, biographical works), and particulars may vary. Reliability: corroborated across multiple sources (the figure itself is a reported detail). But the historical skeleton — that Ch'ien Mu sought to resign three times from 1962 and finally left as Head of New Asia College in 1965 — is supported by official and multiple sources and is beyond doubt.

After Ch'ien Mu's departure, New Asia's scholarly succession did not cease. According to the New Asia Institute of Advanced Chinese Studies entry^※, Tang Chun-i became Director of the New Asia Institute in 1968; in August 1974 the Institute separated from CUHK to come under the newly established New Asia Education and Culture Foundation, and CUHK ceased its funding. This museum will not comment further on this personnel change — the administrative and funding details of the Institute's independence are a neighbouring but distinct issue from this article's focus on the "Ch'ien Mu–Li Choh-ming philosophical divergence"; interested readers may consult the relevant account in The Fulton Reform and College Autonomy.

Ch'ien Mu's resignation marked a concrete eruption of the tension between the "cultural idealist" camp and the "modern institutionalist" camp in the University's early years. According to the historical record, this departure was of a piece with the fierce opposition of New Asia College during the 1976 Fulton reform — when nine college board members, including Ch'ien Mu, Tang Chun-i, Li Tsu-fa, Shen I-chen, Ng Woon-sheung, Hsu Chi-liang, Lau Hon-tung, Jen Kuo-jung, and Kwok Cheng-ta, collectively resigned in protest (see fulton-reform-and-college-autonomy.md): New Asia's wariness of centralisation was in deep spiritual continuity with its founding scholars' insistence on "the subject-status of college culture." In other words, the individual "resignation" of Ch'ien Mu in 1965 and the collective "resignation" of New Asia in 1976 were two echoes, eleven years apart, of the same stand.

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# 6. Historical Assessment: A Double Legacy

The Ch'ien Mu–Li Choh-ming divergence should not be reduced to "who was right and who was wrong." Over the long arc of history, both men left significant legacies:

Ch'ien Mu's legacy: he instilled in CUHK a spiritual gene of "Chinese culture as the foundation." That gene lives on in the New Asia spirit, the humanistic tradition of the college system, the Institute of Chinese Studies and the Art Museum (see 05-campus/art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md), and even the spatial tribute to his philosophy of "the unity of Heaven and humanity" in the "Pavilion of Harmony" on the New Asia campus (see 15-campus-lore/ju-ming-gate-and-pavilion-of-harmony.md) — to this day a cultural marker that distinguishes CUHK from every other university in Hong Kong.

Li Choh-ming's legacy: as founding Vice-Chancellor, over more than a decade he laid the institutional skeleton of a modern comprehensive research university — academic structures, administrative systems, international links, as well as foundational acts such as the adoption in 1964 of the University motto "Through learning and temperance to virtue" (博文约礼) and the conferral of the first degrees. According to the English Wikipedia^※, student numbers grew from under 1,400 to more than 6,000 during his tenure, and he established academic structures in economics and business administration; he was also, by background, a professor of business administration at Berkeley, compiled a Cantonese romanisation dictionary (the "Li romanisation"), and published it simultaneously in the West and in mainland China in 1981. Without that modern institutional framework, CUHK could hardly have grown into the world-class university it is today.

CUHK's later self-definition — "combining tradition with modernity, and bringing together China and the West" — is, in a sense, the product of the long tension and eventual fusion of Ch'ien Mu's "cultural ideal" and Li Choh-ming's "modern institutions." The founding-era clash of visions was thus not a mere episode of "internal friction," but the earliest act of self-fashioning of CUHK's identity. After Li Choh-ming stepped down in 1978, successive Vice-Chancellors — Ma Lin, Charles Kao, Arthur Li, Ambrose King, Lawrence Lau, Joseph Sung, and Rock Chen — each in turn continued or adjusted this line of tension between "culture" and "modernity/internationalism," as detailed in the timeline of Vice-Chancellors' governance struggles.

This long line of tension between "cultural subjecthood" and "modern institutionalism" belongs to the same spiritual family as the "Chinese mission vs internationalisation" and "college autonomy vs centralisation" threads that this museum repeatedly returns to — together they answer the fundamental question that has run through CUHK for over half a century: in a "Chinese University," how exactly are the words "China" and "modern/international" to be arranged?

A necessary note of restraint: the Ch'ien Mu–Li Choh-ming divergence has not lacked melodramatic retellings (cast, for example, as a "clash of egos" or "factional infighting"). This museum, drawing on official historical material and reliable second-hand sources, records only the verifiable skeleton — "a divergence in educational philosophy + repeated defeats by vote in the inter-college meetings + the 1965 resignation (including the reported forgoing of a retirement gratuity)" — and sets out both men's visions side by side with attribution. It endorses neither camp's interpretation, nor does it speculate about the personal motives of the men involved. Both founding scholars are deceased; judgment on their differences is best left to historians working from fuller primary archives, not settled by this museum. This is also this museum's consistent approach to sensitive campus-history subjects involving "disagreements among founding scholars": record the events, present the accounts, and impute no motives.

Related reading: New Asia College: An In-Depth Archive (including the hard early days on Kweilin Street), The Fulton Reform and College Autonomy, The Debate over Medium of Instruction and Internationalisation, The Pavilion of Harmony and "the Unity of Heaven and Humanity", Timeline of Vice-Chancellors' Governance Struggles, The Council Restructuring Controversy (2023), The Founding of CUHK.

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