Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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The China Medical Board’s Fellowship Programs and Its Shifting Focus to Taiwan during the Postwar Era, 1951–1973

March 6, 2023

In this report, I investigate the institutionalization of the China Medical Board's (CMB) exchange fellowship programs and its shifting focus from Mainland China to a broader East Asia region from 1951 to 1973. In particular, this report looks at the CMB fellowship programs in Taiwan, which facilitated a gigantic wave of young health professionals moving from Taiwan to the United States during the postwar era. I begin by analyzing the major historical events that ultimately shifted CMB's direction from Mainland China to other parts of Asia, and the ways in which Taiwan became a critical focus for CMB after its retreat from Mainland China. The report's second half lies in the anatomy of the CMB fellowship program's operation in the two elite medical schools in Taiwan—the Medical College at the National Taiwan University (NTU) and the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC). I examine the demographical trends from the CMB fellowship allocation files and the key components that emerged from the CMB fellowship program.

China Medical Board, Inc.; Medicine and Healthcare; Nursing; Rockefeller Foundation

International Development Organizations and Agricultural Development in Taiwan, 1945-1975

January 1, 2012

In 1973, one of the last American commissioners of the Sino-US Joint Commission on the Rural Reconstruction of China, Bruce H. Billings, wrote in his final report on the legacy of the Commission: "Because the Taiwan story is largely a success story, I believe that professionals in the development business should spend time studying the development history of the island " The success story was the "Taiwan miracle." Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Taiwan transformed itself from a former Japanese colony primarily exporting rice and sugar to a "developed" nation with a seven billion USD gross domestic product (GDP) in 1972. Over the course of twenty years, starting in 1950, nominal GDP rose an astonishing 2700%. A large reason for this rapid growth was the development project initiated by the United States and international organizations and carried out by the "professionals in the development business."

Key issues to insert American Medical to Post-war Taiwan

January 1, 2009

Most scholarship on the history of Taiwanese society considers 1945 as either a starting point or an ending point. The history of the medical profession offers us a rich array of phenomena to trace transitions in Taiwanese society across this divide, in a way that is empirically grounded and analytically subtle. Formal medical education began in colonial Taiwan in 1897. What began as an intensive program in first-aid soon expanded to a formal medical school in 1902 and eventually became a part of the Japanese imperial university system in 1928. While the Japanese medical profession is most commonly associated with its German influences, colonial medicine in Taiwan also adopted several aspects of British tropical medicine, creating a truly unique hybrid. Under this system, generations of medical professionals in Taiwan were guided by professional criteria of German medicine in general practice and British standards in tropical medicine until the 1950s.

Taiwan's Malaria Eradication in a Global Context

January 1, 2009

My research interest is how public health was addressed during the Cold War period. In my present project, I argue that malaria eradication in Taiwan, one of the countries that first introduced the planned spraying of DDT for malaria control and that adopted a vision of eradication, best suits my line of inquiry as a research subject.

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