Yang Kuo-shu

Yang Kuo-shu (; 22 December 1932 – 17 July 2018) was a Taiwanese psychologist and political activist. He was a professor of psychology at National Taiwan University, where he was also the chair of its psychology department. He also the became the vice-president of Academic Sinica in 1996 and was elected as an academician in 1998. He was an advocate for political freedom and democracy during the Martial Law era, and was the founding president of the Taipei Society.

Education and career Yang was born on 22 December 1932 into a peasant family in Qingdao, Shandong, Republic of China, and moved to Taiwan with his parents in 1947. When he was little, a fortune-teller predicted that he would not become an educated person, and he was determined to prove the prediction wrong.

Yang later went to study at the University of Illinois in the United States and earned his Ph.D. in 1969. He returned to teach at NTU afterwards and became the first person in Taiwan with a Ph.D. in psychology.

Academic contributions Yang is considered the founder of indigenized Chinese psychology. He proposed the distinction between indigenized versus westernized psychology. He argued that Western psychology, largely based on research done in American or Western societies, is in fact the "indigenous psychology for Americans or Westerners"—it is based on Western values and traditions and may not be applicable in non-Western countries. Beginning in the 1970s, he conducted research on Chinese cultural societies, studying unique phenomena such as yuanfen, filial piety, guanxi, and face. Yang served as the founding president of the society, which aimed to promote "freedom, fairness, diversity, and the equitable distribution of wealth". He called for the restoration of constitutional rule and the exclusion of military personnel from the government cabinet. He participated in the Wild Lily student movement for democracy in 1990.

Personal life In 1962, Yang married Li Pen-hua , the daughter of Lieutenant General Li Li-po .

After Yang suffered a stroke, President Tsai Ing-wen and Secretary-General Chen Chu visited him at the nursing home in May 2018. Yang died on 17 July 2018 at National Taiwan University Hospital, aged 85. Tsai praised him for his scholarship and for his courage to protest against government repression, calling him an "exemplary public intellectual".