Paul Lin Ta-kuang (simplified Chinese: 林达光; traditional Chinese: 林達光; pinyin: Lín Dáguāng; Wade–Giles: Lin Ta-kuang (March 14, 1920 – July 4, 2004) was a Canadian-Chinese political scientist and peace activist, the founding Director of McGill's Center for East Asian Studies (1965-1982) and Rector of the University of East Asia in Macau (now Macau University) from 1986 to 1988.
At Ann Arbor he engaged in public speaking, winning the first prize at the 1942 Northern Oratorical League with a speech supporting Chinese war effort against Japan.
Feeling the increasingly hostile political climate in the United States he decided to move to China with his family in 1949, before finishing his dissertation at Harvard.
[7] In China, he became close to premier Zhou Enlai, thanks to his contacts with a prominent returned Chinese academic he knew from Michigan and Harvard, Pu Shouchang 浦壽昌 (1922-2019).
In 1958, he took part in the first wave of "intellectuals sent down to the countryside" and spent a year working with the peasants in a poverty-stricken village in North China.
At the time, he was considered a controversial figure, object of a series of hostile editorials and reports inspired by Nationalist regime in Taiwan.
[10] The death of his son Christopher in a car accident close to the border between the US and Canada in August 1966, raised a strong but unproven suspicion that it was a hit arranged by the Nationalist government as a warning to his father, a not unusual strategy at the time.
[11] He was one of the most influential voices advocating the recognition of China, most prominently at the 1966 Banff conference bringing together academics and foreign and Canadian diplomats, and at the 1967 Geneva convocation based on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth).
In 1969, he organized the McGill’s China Consultation, bringing together Canadian as well as American academic and public figures with the aim to improve Sino-Canadian and Sino-American relations.
[15] While not receiving any such nomination, Lin was generally perceived as an advisor to Trudeau and Kissinger and served for the following years as one of the main informal channels between China and Canadian and American politicians, journalists and academics[16][17][18] Beside this informal role Lin was a key player in developing economic ties between Canada and China, where in 1978 he led a ground-breaking trade delegation.
In his role as rector he conferred an honorary Doctor of Law degree on the former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
After his resignation, Lin settled back in Vancouver and became an Honorary Professor in the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia.