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. In 1945, he became the
dean of arts at the
National Taiwan University in Taipei. He disappeared on March 11, 1947, shortly after the
February 28 incident. ==References==