Soochow University was established in Soochow city (now spelled Suzhou) in China’s Jiangsu Province by missionaries of the American Methodist Church in March 1900. But in 1949, after the Communist takeover of Mainland China, the school in Soochow city was forced to close down. In 1954, Soochow University was reestablished in Taiwan and the Department of Political Science was one of the first four departments which have been reinstated. It has been fifty years since then. We have a lot of progress in the aspects of increasing books and facilities, promoting teaching qualification and course planning owing to our successive chairs’ endeavors. They are Professor Fo-chan Chuang, Professor Chao-chan Wang, Professor Liang-yan Chou, Professor Heng-zhi Du, Professor Ren-fu Kuo, Professor Chao-hong Huang, Professor Mab Huang and Professor Shiow-duan Hawang. The current chairman of the department of political science is Associate Professor Chih-Cheng Lo.

Since 1973, the department of political science has been enlarged to enroll new students for two classes per year, but we reduced the number of classes to one temporarily 1983. In 1986, we resumed to two classes. The graduate program was established in 1991 and the Ph. D. program was set up in 1998. We have 486 undergraduate majors and our graduate school presently has 13 doctoral students and there are 90 students who are pursuing their M. A. degrees at present. The faculty of the Department consists of 23 experienced full-time teachers, of which 18 have Ph. D. background.