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Archive of Reflections

Chang-Lin Tien: the Asian American

Richard Atkinson | John F. Cummins | Horace Mitchell | C.D. "Dan" Mote Jr. | Orville Schell

"It's clear that he was the most famous Asian American in the United States because of his scientific career, and being the chancellor of the world's greatest university. His fundraising in Asia was quite phenomenal because they recognized a person who was really quite outstanding. Chang-Lin, I think it was fair to say, while he was chancellor, was the most famous Asian American in the world. He was known by everyone."

Richard Atkinson
President, 1995-2003
University of California

"He changed the face of Berkeley in the international community. It was huge, obviously in China and Taiwan. There I think he was like a rock star. I never traveled with him. I wish I had, but I've heard all the stories. He'd walk down the street, and he'd have people coming out of the shops. 'Oh, that's Chancellor Tien.' It was a really big deal."

John F. Cummins
Associate Chancellor - Chief of Staff
University of California, Berkeley

"He certainly was very committed to his Asian culture, spent a good deal of time, did a lot of fundraising in Asia as well. Certainly that was a part of who he was in a very direct way. That too kind of represented a kind of personal integrity, not leaving who you are at the door, bringing it with you. There was certainly a graciousness on his part that one might say is typically in Asian communities."

Horace Mitchell
President
California State University, Bakersfield

"Chang-Lin's position as chancellor and his personal ties with prominent leaders in Asia made him a particularly powerful informal ambassador, especially to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. As a trusted and respected leader himself, he was one of the few people who could move across political boundaries and carry messages between governments across the Taiwan Strait. Especially during the latter years of his tenure, he used his personal prestige to broker peace and to take stands for democratic reforms and economic development in the region. The government of Hong Kong awarded Tien its highest award, the Grand Bauhunia Medal, for service to the territory. When we walked down the street in Taipei, it was like walking down a street in Chicago with Michael Jordan. People ran out of shops and restaurants to greet him. Hotels offered their suites to get him to stay there because of his star power. In 1992, on my first day with him in Taipei, he was on television three times, once with President Lee. On the mainland, Chinese astronomers named a newly discovered asteroid 'Tienchanglin' in his honor.

Chang-Lin felt deeply responsible for the Asian-American community. As the first Asian chief executive officer of a major U.S. university, as a member of the Chinese-American Committee of 100, as a forceful advocate for diversity at Berkeley and elsewhere, Chang-Lin carried the burden of using his personal achievement to facilitate progress for Asian Americans. He would painfully recount stories of his own experiences with housing discrimination in Berkeley, of Asian admission quotas on campus, and of the absence of Asian Americans in the highest levels of government. At the same time he loved America and the American Dream. A poor kid from Taiwan, whose parents had lost everything, who arrived in this country with nothing but a bus ticket to Louisville, and who wound up as chancellor of the greatest university in the land -- he was the personification of the American Dream. He started with nothing, knew nobody, and had no advantages intrinsic to his race, ethnicity, language, ancestry, or anything else. He was just faster, smarter, and better than everybody else, and in the American Dream that is enough."

C.D. "Dan" Mote Jr.
President
University of Maryland, College Park

"He was, of course, much revered by Asian Americans, who saw in him the realization of this country's promise to immigrants. But he was also deeply admired and respected by others for the way he had managed, while maintaining his sense of Chinese culture, not only to cross the abyss from China to America in one lifetime, but then to become completely negotiable on both sides of the divide. He became a leader not only in this country, but in Asia as well.

Indeed, when it came to China, whether dealing with the leadership of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or the Dalai Lama, he was unfailingly receptive, fair and frank. I often thought that, had he lived, he would have made the perfect U.S. ambassador to China.

Rather than his own unalloyed fame, power, wealth or celebrity, what he adopted as his index of success was the health of the UC Berkeley community, which became his larger family, or clan. In this, he was a model of the kind of traditional Chinese virtue in which he was steeped as a child. He was a classical latter-day junzi, a term often translated as 'a superior man,' a moral person of deep self-cultivation whose universe revolves around the five Confucian virtues: zhi, uprightness or inner integrity; yi, righteousness; zhong, loyalty and conscientiousness toward others; shu, altruism or reciprocity; and ren, love or humanity. As Confucius observed: 'The junzi takes righteousness as his basic stuff, practices with the rules of correct usage, brings it forth with modesty, and renders it complete with sincerity.'

Chang-Lin Tien was a traditionalist in modern dress. That he could have become an American hero at the same time that he was such a model of classical Chinese virtue and such a role model for those millions of Asian Americans, who have more recently made that great odyssey from a foreign homeland to this country, is precisely what made him unique and so much more than just a great university chancellor."

Orville Schell
Dean, the Graduate School of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley

Photo of Chang-Lin Tien by John Blaustein, courtesy UC Berkeley

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