A little about Liang Rongruo

This information about Liang comes from the dissertation I mentioned below by Su-San Lee.

Liang was born in Beijing in 1904 and went to the Imperial University of Tokyo for graduate school. According to Lee, "he stayed in the Japanese-occupied Beijing for seven years, ostensibly as a lecturer in two normal schools whereas [sic] secretly serving as a secretary to the underground KMT" (401).

He became a professor at Tunghai at the invitation of Xu Fuguan in 1957--at that time, Liang "was a famous essayist, the vice president of the National Language Daily, and a full-time professor at the Normal College" (402). "However," continues Lee, "conflicts began after Xu recommended Liang for the chairmanship of the Chinese department at Tunghai in 1961" (402).

Lee describes a power struggle between Xu and Liang that took several forms--anonymous letters attacking various colleagues, secret taping of confidential conversations between Liang and Xu, and accusations back and forth between Xu and Liang. People in literary circles quickly moved to either Xu's side or Liang's:

Pro-Xu and pro-Liang people formed two conflicting camps: Xu had the editors of Chinese Magazine, Yangming Magazine, Cultural Banner Magazine (Wenhuaqi) and the Poets Association as his supporters. To them Liang's scholarship as revealed in his prize winning book Biographies of Ten Writers (Wenxue shijia zhuang) was problematic; but his China-bashing remarks in "Japanese Culture and Chinese Culture" [an essay written during the Sino-Japanese War] were even more inexcusable. Yet Liang was backed by politically more powerful men of letters, including the former General Secretary of the KMT and Minister of Education Zhang Qiyun, many of whom believed that the patriotism that Liang later disclosed was strong enough to vindicate his earlier mistake. (403)

The conflicts between Xu and Liang simmered, then flared up again in 1968. Finally, in 1969, the Tunghai administration forced Liang to retire and Xu to leave, too (408).

Source: Lee, Su-San. Xu Fuguan and New Confucianism in Taiwan (1949-1969): A Cultural History of the Exile Generation. Doctoral dissertation, Brown University, 1998.