Award ceremony held on March 9 at the Luce Chapel The Yongjae Awards were established in 1995 to commemorate the scholarship and virtues of Dr. “Yongjae” Baek Nak-jun. This year, Professor Kim Byung-min of Yanbian University in China was awarded the Yongjae Scholarship Award, and Professor Lee Hong-yung of UC Berkeley was named Yongjae Chair Professor. Yonsei University President Jeong Chang-young congratulated the recipients of this year’s Awards and stated that “Korean Studies no longer belong exclusively to us. We live in an age of globalization where Korean Studies should expand to the world. . . . Through this year’s Yongjae Awards we have taken a step towards globalizing Korean Studies.”

Yongjae Academic Award - President Kim Byung-min of Yanbian University In accepting the Award, President Kim Byung-min of Yanbian University said: “I am truly honored to receive the Yongjae Award at the Yonsei campus, where the monument of Yanbian poet Yun Tong-ju lies. I will accept this award not as a personal honor but as an award given to the Yanbian University and Joseon Society of Korean Studies.” President Kim Byung-min was the first person to receive a doctorate degree in China as a Joseon Literature major from Yanbian University. Aside from being the leading Korean Studies expert, President Kim has also worked to make Yanbian University the center of Korean Studies in China. Currently over 40 universities in China teach Korean Studies, 85 percent of the professors being graduates of Yanbian University. Yongjae Chair Professor - Professor Lee Hong-yung of UC Berkeley Professor Lee Hong-yung, this year’s Yongjae Chair Professor, is a leading scholar in East Asian political studies. He said, “This occasion feels all the more special because, exactly 50 years ago, I was a freshman at Yonsei. In the past half century, Korea and Yonsei have made great achievements. The success of Korea was possible because of the emphasis put on education by the people, but also because Yonsei played its role well in this society. I will try to make my contribution to the humanities through a comparative approach to the study of Korea, China, and Japan.” Professor Lee graduated from the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Yonsei University in 1961 and received his doctorate degree in politics at the University of Chicago. He was a professor of political science in Yale and UC Berkeley and is currently acknowledged as a leading scholar in the field of East Asian Studies. He has lectured on Chinese politics at Peking University, Wuhan University, Fudan University, and the National Taiwan University. His book From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (1991) is thought to be a masterpiece in the analysis of the political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Professor Lee is currently Asia Research Project Director of the University California at Berkeley, and for the next five years is planning a comparative study of the institutional template of Korea, China, and Japan. He is putting together a research team of scholars from the three countries, and has already secured funding for the project.