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Fred Hung
Professor, UH-Manoa Economics, 1960 - 1987
Fred C. Hung was born in Shanghai, China and received his undergraduate degree in economics from the St. John's University, Shanghai, in 1947 at the head of his class. He entered the graduate program in Economics at the National Central University, Nanking, that Fall after passing an entrance examination which admitted only three out of over three hundred applicants. He was ranked number two. All those admitted were given full scholarships, with free room and board at the student dormitory. But he did not finish the two-year M.A. program. Instead, he accepted a Foreign Exchange Scholarship from the University of Washington and came to Seattle, Washington, to study in the Fall of 1948. He fully intended to return to China and serve his country after the completion of his master's degree. But fate played a trick on him, as the Chinese government changed hands in 1949, and his parents moved to Taiwan before the communists took over the Chinese mainland. What happened changed his whole life.
The Foreign Exchange Scholarship of the University of Washington paid only for tuition. Although his father held a high position in the postal services in Taiwan, his salary was meager due to political instability and the effects of high inflation in Taiwan. Luckily, Fred was able to find part-time jobs in the Department of Economics to support himself. Fred received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1955. His experience before he came to the University of Hawaii included: UW Teaching Associate (1950-52), UW Acting Instructor (1952-55), Acting Assistant Professor (1955-56) in the UW Department of Economics; and Research Associate in the UW Far Eastern and Russian Institute (1955-56); Research Fellow, East Asian Studies Center, Harvard University (1956-57); Acting Assistant Professor (1957-58) and Assistant Professor of Economics (1958-60), University of California, Davis, and Member, Executive Committee, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley (1959-60).
In 1960 Fred moved to Hawaii to accept half-time appointments with the UH-Manoa Economic Research Center (ERC) and the UH-Manoa Department of Economics. The Economics Department promoted him to Associate Professor in 1962. In January, 1963, Professor Shelley Mark, Director of the Economic Research Center, took leave from his post to join the cabinet of newly elected Governor John Burns, and Fred became the ERC's Acting Director. Fred played an active role in supervising the ERC staff's research while directing his own research projects. His ERC report (co-authored with Dr. Vernon A. Mund, Professor of Economics at the University of Washington), Interlocking Relationships in Hawaii and Public Regulation of Ocean Transportation, caught the public's attention after its publication in 1961. Sylvia Porter spent five days reporting on this study in her nationally syndicated column that appeared in over 200 U.S. newspapers, including the Honolulu Advertiser. The interlocking relationships across the Boards of Directors of Hawaii's "Big Five" corporations and other companies in Hawaii and the possible implications of these relationships for Matson Navigation Company's freight rates and Hawaii's high cost of living were hotly debated in the State Legislature. The study was a major impetus behind the Hawaii State Legislature's enactment of antitrust legislation in 1963.
 In July 1966, Fred left the ERC to become a full-time faculty member of the Department of Economics. He then immediately took a one-year leave as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar in Taiwan. After returning to UH-Manoa in September, 1966, he was promoted to full Professor in 1968.
In 1968, Fred was appointed chair of the UH-Manoa East Asian Studies committee on a half-time basis, a position which lasted for six years and led to his appointment in 1976 as the Founding Director of the National Resource Center-East Asia, now located in the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies. In 1981, Fred decided to leave the Center and return to the Department of Economics as a full-time faculty member. When he returned from a conference in Taipei, he was surprised to learn that the Economics Department faculty had unanimously recommended his appointment as Department Chair to the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, who was urging him to take the post, suddenly available due to the decision of the former Chair, Professor Walter Miklius, to spend a year with the U.S. Dept. of Transportation.
Fred succeeded in resolving some of the structural problems within the department and tried to govern openly and fairly. For all important decisions made during his six years as Chair, he often consulted the committee members privately and resolved differences with them before he called committee or department meetings. He believed that the chair's job should not be kept by any person for too long and was instrumental, with help of the Department's Executive Committee, in passing a resolution limiting it to two terms of three years each. Fred retired from the University of Hawaii in 1987 at the age of 62, believing that productive younger members of the faculty would like to assume a larger role in Department governance.
Fred's interest in East Asian Studies kept him in contact with many scholars and government officials in the United States and East Asia. He co-authored several research reports and an article in China Quarterly (the leading journal in the field) with Dr. Y.L. Wu, Professor, University of San Francisco and the Hoover Institute, and one of the leading authorities in the field of Chinese Studies. Fred served as a member of the Standing Committee of ASPAC (Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast) for many years and was the chair of the Committee during 1981-82. He also served as a member of the Council of Conferences of the Asian Studies Association (1983-1986), was an external examiner in Economics and Commerce at the Nanyang University in Singapore for 1971-74, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Contemporary China Center of the National Australian University in December 1984 and January 1985.
Fred attended many academic and policy meetings in Taiwan, including the annual National Reconstruction Conference (1971 and 1981) and the 6th National Conference on Education (1987). He presented numerous lectures on China's economic reforms, including two in December 1991 at the "Workshop on China's Economic Development", jointly sponsored by the Asian Development Bank and the People's Bank of China. When UH President Albert Simone and his successor, UH President Kenneth Mortimer, received invitations from the Taiwan Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Education for official visits in 1988 and 1994, respectively, Fred was asked to accompany them and he graciously served as their liaison to Taiwan's academic community and government officials.
Fred sat on many departmental, college and university committees and contributed his time freely. For several years he was a member of the Faculty Senate of the UH-Manoa College of Arts & Sciences and served one year as chair of its Executive Committee. He regularly gave lectures and talks on and off the campus that featured his updates and analysis of China's ongoing reforms and Taiwan's spectacular economic growth.
Before his retirement, Fred arranged to set-up an endowment at the University of Hawaii Foundation to annually fund two Hung Family Scholarships for graduate studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. One of the full scholarships funds a graduate student studying Chinese Economic Development, while the second funds a graduate student studying Contemporary Chinese Intellectual History. They are administered by the UH-Manoa Department of Economics and Department of History, respectively.
After his retirement, Fred was offered a visiting professorship at Anhui University, China, and the Directorship of the Institute of International Economics at the new National Chung Cheng University in Chia-Yi, Taiwan. Fred traveled to Taipei in February, 1989 for an interview. After a long talk with Dr. Ching-Kiang Lin, the president-designate of the new university, he was deeply impressed by Dr. Lin's sincerity and vision for a first-rate university. The planning for the university had started two years earlier and a blueprint had been carefully prepared by the committee which he headed. Among its important provisions were promises by the government that it would minimize bureaucratic interference and provide full budgetary support; a requirement that each faculty member have a doctorate degree; and a promise to provide faculty with adequate library resources and computer facilities to conduct first-rate research.
The university's plan was to establish five colleges and to start the university's first year with one graduate institute in each college. For the next four years, the plan was for each of the five colleges to add another new institute every year. Once a college had three institutes under its jurisdiction, it would be officially recognized. In its fourth year, an institute would be authorized to start its Ph.D. and undergraduate programs. At that time, a department with its own staff would be established within the Institute to handle undergraduate affairs, and the Institute director will also initially serve as the department chair.
The Colleges were to be established in the areas of Liberal Arts, Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences, and Management. The blueprint for the College of Management specified that the Institute of International Economics would be located in the College of Management. The College would follow by establishing four more Institutes over the next four years: Finance and Banking, Business Management, Information Management, and Accountancy, in that order.
The new university was allotted 132 acres of raw land in a village about 20 miles from the city of Chia-Yi. Fred first visited the site in June 1989, accompanied by Dr. Lin. Construction of the campus was underway and a highway was being built linking the campus with the city. The university's plan was to initially rent the old campus of an agriculture college in the city and then move to the new campus when it was ready for occupation.
Fred accepted the President's challenge and agreed to serve a two-year term. However, since the person whom he recruited as his replacement could not make it in 1992, Fred was asked by President Lin to stay on for another year. He was also asked to serve as Acting Dean of the College of Management in 1991-1992.
Fred worked in Chia-Yi in the summer of 1989, doing the necessary work to recruit an office staff and four new faculty members for the Institute's first year. He officially reported to duty on 1 December, 1989, in time to administer the entrance examination for the first class of ten M.A. students and to prepare for the start of classes in the Spring of 1990. As a part of his teaching load, he organized a lecture series, Economic Issues of Taiwan and the World, and invited well-known scholars from Taiwan and from abroad to the university to give lectures. During the three-year series, visiting scholars delivered 36 lectures, and a collection of sixteen selected lectures from the first two years was published in book form in 1992, just after Fred left the university to return to Honolulu.
The construction of the new campus went smoothly. By August, 1991, ten of the major buildings were finished. The College of Management had its own five-story building, the first three floors of which were ready for use. By the time Fred left in 1992, most of the campus construction had been finished. The university had elegant buildings in a spacious campus with rows and rows of tall trees; over 10,000 of them had been moved from other locations and replanted on the new campus.
During the three years in Chia-Yi , Fred helped to plan for the other four institutes of his college and was responsible for hiring the first two of their directors. When he left Chung Cheng in July 1992, the Institute of International Economics already had 17 M.A. graduates and had admitted two Ph.D. and 50 freshman students, ready to begin classes in the Fall of 1992.
Fred and his wife Hwa were invited to attend the grand celebration of the 12th Anniversary of the National Chung Cheng University on 30 October, 2001. They were treated royally by the new president of the university, its faculty, staff and students and were presented with a special award. Fred was grateful that his work had been recognized.
Fred met Hwa at the University of Washington. They married in 1955. They have three children, two girls and a boy in the middle. Since the older and the younger daughter are only 23 months apart, Hwa stayed home and practiced her special field of nutrition in the family. She sacrificed her professional career for the sake of the children. Luckily, they all did well. Two attended Harvard University, and one the University of Pennsylvania. All three--and their spouses--have received advanced graduate training at well known universities and have done well in their respective specialties. Fred and Hwa have two grandsons and two granddaughters.
Fred C. Hung
Honolulu, HI
January 18, 2007
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