Lin Mosei
Taiwanese academic, educator (1887–1947)

Lin Mosei (Chinese: 林茂生; pinyin: Lín Màoshēng; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Lîm Bō͘-seng; Katakana: リン モセイ; born 30 October 1887, disappeared 11 March 1947) was a Taiwanese academic and educator. He was the first Taiwanese person to receive a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in the United States. He was also a calligrapher and a Christian.
Lin disappeared within days of the February 28 Incident in Taiwan in 1947; he is generally believed to have been killed as a part of Chinese Nationalist Party's crackdown after the island-wide civilian uprising.
Lin's second son, Lin Tsung-yi, was an academic and educator in psychiatry.
Life and career
Mosei was born on October 30, 1887, in Tainan Prefecture (now Tainan), Qing Taiwan, to a Presbyterian minister. In 1916, he earned a B.A. in philosophy from Tokyo Imperial University, becoming the first Taiwanese graduate of the institution. In 1928, he received an M.A. in literature from Columbia University in New York, where he studied under prominent scholars John Dewey and Paul Monroe. The following year, in 1929, he obtained his Ph.D. in education from Columbia. His doctoral dissertation, Public Education in Formosa Under the Japanese Administration: A Historical and Analytical Study of the Development and the Cultural Problems, was written in English and was not translated into Chinese until 2000.
The public source identifies “Lin Mosei” as taiwanese academic, educator (1887–1947). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mosei, Taiwanese and academic.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3846518. VIAF identifies the subject as 78070009. The Library of Congress control number is n97103688. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1947, 1916 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lin Mosei” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.