Diasporic Chinese Ventures

The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu

GREGOR BENTON, Hong Liu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415331425
• eBook ISBN: 9781134323579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of essays by and about Wang Gungwu brings together some of Wang's most recent and representative writing about the ethnic Chinese outside China giving the reader a deeper understanding of his views on migration, identity, nationalism and culture, all key issues in modern Asia's transformation. The book collects interviews, speeches and essays that illustrate the development and direction of Wang's scholarship on ethnic and diasporic Chinese.

Part I

ENCOUNTERS

1

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK

An interview with Wang Gungwu¹

Hong Liu

Liu	Professor Wang, thank you for granting me this interview opportunity. How did your family circumstances affect your early years?
Wang	My father Wang Fowen (1904–1972) was born in Taizhou in Jiangsu. He graduated from Nanjing’s Dongnan University in 1925 and then went south. He worked as a teacher in Chinese schools in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Malacca. At the age of 25, he was appointed head of the first Chinese school in Surabaya in Indonesia, where I was born in 1930. Later, during the economic slump, the school was forced to close and we returned to Malaya, where father became deputy school-inspector in Perak. So I was brought up in Ipoh and received my education at Anderson School, through the medium of English.
Liu	Given your English education, how did you develop an interest in Chinese culture and history?
Wang	It came through my parents. When I was still an infant, no more than 3 or 4 years old, my mother taught me Chinese characters. I learned texts off by heart and copied them out. Later, my father taught me classical Chinese, starting with the Three-Character Classic. However, he knew that fathers rarely find it easy to teach their sons so he set up a special class at home and arranged for me to study Chinese alongside the children of his friends.
Liu	Did you ever go to China as a child?
Wang	My father was always keen to return to China, but his salary at Surabaya middle school was too meagre to allow him to get beyond Singapore. Later, in 1936, he took me back to China with him. His relatives in Taizhou said that war with Japan would soon break out and that we would do better to stay abroad, from where we would be able to help the family economically. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, he again wanted to go back, but he decided to wait until I’d finished my education. I was quite good at English, so I skipped a year and went straight into the senior Cambridge class. In April 1947, I graduated from middle school. Father retired and took me to Nanjing, where I sat the entrance exam for the National Central University (the then new name of Dongnan University).
Liu	How did you fare in the exams?
Wang	I had no problems with English and Chinese, but maths and science were quite a challenge. We’d done maths and science in English in Malaya, so I had to work hard to acquire a new specialized vocabulary. I spent little more than a year at the National Central University, in the Foreign Languages Department, but Nanjing started to descend into chaos after the Communists launched their Huai-Hai Campaign in October 1948. In November, the university closed down. Most teachers and students went home, just a few of us remained. Everyone expected the fighting would soon reach Nanjing.
Liu	So your family decided to return to Malaya?
Wang	Back in China, my father had started teaching in the middle school attached to the university, but he could not get used to the Nanjing climate and his health was poor. I remember I sometimes used to help him mark exam scripts after arriving home in the evenings. At about that time, some educationalists in Ipoh invited him to return, so in 1948 both my parents went back to Malaya. They were heartbroken. They knew they’d never get another chance to return to China.
Liu	So you were left in Nanjing by yourself in 1948?
Wang	That’s right. My father used to send me eighteen Hong Kong dollars a month. Every time I needed money, I’d change one dollar. Inflation raged because of the fighting, so I was a millionaire, at least on paper. I was an only child, so my parents were particularly worried about my safety and urged me to rejoin them. Actually, I couldn’t care less at the time whether I studied or not. The university had closed down, so there was nothing to study anyway. In late 1948 I donated my books to the library, gathered together the bare necessities, and boarded the train for Shanghai, like a refugee. (I didn’t even have to buy a ticket.) I then returned to Malaya by way of Xiamen, Jilong (in Taiwan), and Hong Kong.
Liu	I suppose returning to Malaya was a decisive turn in your life. How did you manage to blend in and adapt?
Wang	In early 1949, I taught for a few months in Ipoh. After that, I enrolled at the University of Malaya in Singapore to do literature. In my three years at the university, I studied three subjects: English literature, history, and economics. I was offered the chance of doing honours in all 3. My actual interest was literature but I decided to do history, because it seemed to me that the history professor was a good scholar.
Liu	In 1954 you went to London to do your PhD. After getting it, in 1957, you returned home to teach at the University of Malaya. Malaya was then in the midst of the transition from colonialism to independence. What influence did that have on you?
Wang	Those were indeed highly volatile years. In 1948 the British Government declared the Emergency. The struggle against imperialism and colonialism flared up, and I joined in activities on the campus. Subsequently, many of my fellow students became leading lights in Malaysian society and politics. Through the optic of Malayan anti-colonialism and British-style socialism, I acquired a new national identity. That was the first step from being a sojourner to self-consciously deciding to settle outside China. I wasn’t sure where I’d finally end up, but I felt that being a citizen of the Federation of Malaya was a start. Even so, I still felt a sense of responsibility towards China. I needed to finish what I had begun, to understand the unacceptable byways along which that ancient civilization might stray while at the same time realizing that China nonetheless had a future. I discovered that being an ethnic Chinese was no obstacle to completing the switch from sojourner to settler. On the contrary, it was a support. So it was the most natural thing in the world for me to turn towards studying Chinese history.
Liu	In 1968 you were appointed professor and Head of the Department of Far Eastern History at Australian National University. Later you headed the School of Pacific Research at ANU, and in 1986 you became Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University. What is your deepest impression of your years in Hong Kong?
Wang	At the time of my appointment, the Sino-British Joint Declaration had already been signed. I felt that my biggest challenge was to ensure that Hong Kong University was equipped both to adapt to the new postcolonial situation after 1997 and to preserve its scholarly tradition, which was quite unlike that of China’s other universities. I stressed two points in particular. (1) If the university was run well, China would surely value it; the main thing was to keep up standards, so the students could make a contribution to society after graduating. (2) From China’s point of view, Hong Kong’s role was to assist it internationally, in all sorts of ways. After Deng Xiaoping took charge of the reforms, Hong Kong’s role was even more essential. In that respect, I supported a dual-language policy for Hong Kong.
Liu	Was there any opposition to that policy in the run-up to 1997?
Wang	Many people proposed elevating Chinese above English, the colonial language. Actually, regarding Hong Kong’s role and position, that was a bad idea. From the point of view of Hong Kong University and its students and of Hong Kong’s role in the future development of China, a dual-language policy was of the utmost importance. Perhaps that position was misunderstood politically. I discussed the issue with students, parents, and leading figures in Hong Kong society. Basically, they backed me. I’m not against mother-tongue education, but if you turned Hong Kong University into a Chinese-language institution, in what way would it differ from China’s internal universities? How would that help China? I told the students, after the retrocession your Chinese will never be better than that of the students in China. You’ll be lucky even to match their mastery of that language. But if your English is also good, at least there’ll be some things you can do. So I urged them to learn good English. I know it was controversial to say so, but that was my policy and I stuck to it.
Liu	How would you rank teaching and research at Hong Kong University in Asia-Pacific and world terms?
Wang	Quite good. The foundations have been laid, especially in medicine and physics, where research at Hong Kong University bears international comparison. The same might also be said of engineering and law. The situation is a bit more complicated in the humanities and social sciences. When I joined the university, the biggest problem was a lack of research funding. Neither the government nor industry was prepared to help. Their view was that if you wanted to do research, you should go abroad and do it. My own view was that a university with insufficient research funding would never prosper. So I actively canvassed the government for funds. My predecessor, Rayson Lisung Huang, had already done his best: I took up where he left off.
Liu	With what results?
Wang	By 1988, the government had realized the seriousness of the situation. Unless something was done, the brain drain would accelerate. The main reason why most of Hong Kong University’s best students failed to come home after getting their PhDs abroad wasn’t the salary level or the political situation but the lack of research funding. I produced statistics to show the government the extent of the problem. I said, if the majority of our talented young people fail to return, what future will Hong Kong University have? Relying on foreign scholars is no solution. The government saw my point and research money began to flow. Suddenly, you could ask for funds with confidence.
Liu	What other important changes took place during your nine and a half years at Hong Kong University?
Wang	Research saw the biggest changes. When I first arrived, few of the teaching staff really did research, and the level of the research they did do was rather low. By the time I left, four out of five of the staff were doing research, often of top quality. What’s more, the humanities and social sciences had made some progress. In our appointments, we paid more and more attention to research results. Needless to say, this trend is international. Another important thing: I did everything in my power to recruit research students. In the old days, we’d relied mainly on Hong Kong students, but they provided a fairly small pool of researchers, and getting jobs in other spheres was relatively easy. So we started welcoming research students from the mainland and abroad. As long as they came up to scratch, we gave them scholarships – that was especially true of applicants in science and engineering. During my period of office, the number of research students shot up from just a few hundred to around 3,000. I considered that a cause for great satisfaction, for such students will play a major role in promoting future teaching and research.
Liu	You have dozens of scholarly books and scores of articles to your name. You’re a fellow of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, a senior honorary researcher of Beijing’s Academy of Social Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to name just three of your numerous academic distinctions. What would you say have been your chief scholarly contributions?
Wang	My starting point is Chinese history. From the point of view of China, I imagine that my contribution would lie in that direction. My personal background is that of a Southeast Asian Chinese, but my main field of study has been Chinese history. From the point of view of my own personal history, I ought to take as the theme of my research the experience of ethnic Chinese in adapting to local conditions as seen against the background of local transformations. After all, that’s my own experience. All the same, I took Chinese history as my starting point. In my opinion, the two aspects can be combined: one’s point of departure cannot be reduced either to a pure China or to a pure Southeast Asia. That’s the special feature of my work. I do not completely accept the standpoint either of Southeast Asia or of China. I think that makes me relatively objective. I have feelings for both, but neither gets the upper hand.
Liu	Could you tell me about your methodology?
Wang	I was never tempted to adopt Maurice Freedman’s and Bill Skinner’s approach, which is to use the results of studying Chinese outside China to explain Chinese society. I’ve never stressed the numerous historical and contemporary examples of Chinese assimilation, nor do I agree with the present trend just to study the ethnic Chinese response to Southeast Asian nationalism. Instead, my research has always moved between two wishful but ambiguous positions. One is China’s hope – eventually to view all ethnic Chinese outside China as sojourners, as members of the great Chinese family, whose loyalty and patriotism can be counted on in troubled times. The other is the hope of the Chinese migrants and settlers – that their sons and daughters will, to some degree, remain culturally Chinese and ensure the lines of descent, at least for a few generations.
Liu	How is it that you started looking at the issue of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia while at the same time pursuing your study of Chinese history?
Wang	The construction of nation-states is a subtle process that requires new historical approaches. When I started working with colleagues at the University of Malaya to promote the study of Malayan history, we were particularly keen to nurture from among our students a new generation of national historians. As for myself, I put my main effort into researching the history of the Chinese of Malaya, for they had already made the transition from sojourner to citizen, they knew what it meant to be Malayan. In 1959, I published a series of radio talks under the title A Short History of the Nanyang Chinese.^2 That was my first research treatise on the Chinese of Southeast Asia. My research on Chinese history...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Encounters
• Part II Reflections Section 1. Cultural concerns
• Part III Reflections Section 2. Chinese overseas in historical and comparative perspective
• Index