Recently, I came across a speech by 93-year-old historian Prof. Wang Gungwu last year, “ What does it mean to be ethnically Chinese in Singapore?” I find it very interesting and would like to discuss it with the readers here.
Prof. Wang Gungwu is a leading authority on modern Chinese history, and was awarded the Tang Prize in 2020, the Nobel Prize in Sinology. The award recognizes his pioneering and in-depth analysis of China’s role in the world order, the Chinese diaspora, and the transformation of Chinese migration. Wang Gungwu, himself an expert on China and Southeast Asian relations, offers a unique perspective on China by examining the complexity of China’s historical relationships with its southern neighbours. Compared to the traditional view of China from an intrinsic Chinese perspective or from a Western relative perspective, his wealth of knowledge and keen insights have made a novel and important contribution to the interpretation of China’s place in the world.
Chinese people are generally uninterested in history and sinology, yet they think that every Chinese is an expert in sinology and that they are at least more authoritative than Western scholars in terms of what they have experienced and learned about Chinese culture and history since they grew up. In fact, if you think about it, most of what we think we know is what our school teachers taught us when we were young. Since teachers are the authority of children, most of us take what we hear from them as authoritative knowledge, which may be far from the truth. On the other hand, scholars, because of their strict approach to scholarship, would not say too much if they could not prove it to be true themselves, so that they would be regarded as ungrounded truth, or just as simply opinion among others, and would not have much acceptance.
Wang Gungwu’s views were highly regarded by the Singaporean government, and in 2021 he was awarded the Order of Distinguished Service, the country’s highest honor. The awarding of the medal emphasized his publication of “a pioneering work on the history of China, Southeast Asia and East Asia, and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and Singapore, which provides invaluable insights for policy-makers.” This suggests that the Singaporean government’s national policy today is deeply influenced by Wang Gungwu’s research, and in 2022 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the National University of Singapore and the Singapore Prize for Literature.
From the recognition he has received around the world, his research on Chinese identity will inspire Chinese immigrants to Australia to think about where our roots lie.
Who is Wang Gungwu?
Let me start with Wang Gungwu’s birth. Who was he? He was born in 1930 in Surabaya, in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). His father was born in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, during the Qing Dynasty in 1902. After graduating from the Department of English Literature of the Southeast University in Nanjing in 1929, his father was recruited to be the principal of a Chinese language school in Surabaya. Later, due to a change of jobs, Wang Gungwu’s father and his family moved to Ipoh in British Malaya, where he went to elementary school. Wang Gungwu applied for the Cambridge Diploma of Secondary Education public examination in 1946, returned to China in 1947 and enrolled in the Department of History at the National Central University of the Republic of China in Nanjing, and returned to the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1949 to continue his studies after the loss of the Republic of China in the civil war, and then went on to study for a Master’s Degree at the University of Malaya and obtained a PhD at the University of London. He then became a lecturer at the University of Malaya, and in 1968 he moved to Canberra to become a professor of Far Eastern History at the Australian National University.
Wang Gungwu was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) from 1985 to 1995, and I happened to be teaching at HKU at that time, but I had never met him. Later, he retired and settled in Singapore, where he works at the National University of Singapore until today.
When Wang Gungwu was born, Indonesia was not yet a state, so I do not know whether he was a Dutch national or a Chinese born in East India at that time, or whether he was still considered a Chinese. However, he grew up in Malaysia and could have obtained Malaysian residency status. He should have returned to the ROC as an overseas Chinese to study at a university, so did he have ROC nationality? There is no record of this, but it is an open fact that he was naturalized as an Australian citizen when he was teaching at the Australian National University from 1968 to 1985.
However, Wang Gungwu himself is not willing to recognize himself as an Australian, he said, “I have lived in Australia for 18 years, and I have great affection for that country. But I don’t consider myself an Australian, whether it’s my knowledge of them or their knowledge of me, it’s very shallow.”UK
At that time, Australia had just come out of the White Australia policy, but it was still a British society. For a scholar like Wang Gungwu, who was deeply in love with Chinese culture and history, it was not unexpected that he would openly state that he was not an Australian, even though he was an Australian national.
Experiencing a different Chinese society
Wang Gungwu has lived in more Chinese communities than any of us, even if he has never lived in China. Born in the Dutch East Indies, he may have been very young, but in Ipoh, Malaysia, he went to school and was educated in both English and Chinese, so it is fair to say that he knew more about present-day Malaysia. At the university level, he did not choose to study in UK, but returned to the Republic of China in Nanking. I believe it was because he chose to live in his father’s homeland. At that time, Nanjing was in the midst of a civil war, and it took a lot of determination and adaptation to go back to live or study there.
Within two years, Wang Gungwu was forced to return to Malaysia to continue his studies. He chose to study in Singapore, a state with the largest number of Chinese residents, because he believed that Singapore was a Chinese society. Wang Gungwu was politically active and participated in the political organizations founded in Singapore, but did not take part in politics. In the early days of Singapore, he helped found the University of Singapore but emigrated to Australia when he became a professor there.
At that time, there was no Chinese community in Canberra, Australia, nor was there any Chinese culture, which is why Wang Gungwu was unable to integrate into Australia. After living in Canberra for 18 years, Wang Gungwu thought that his understanding of Australian society was superficial, which showed that he could not find his own cultural identity in Australia at that time. However, he also pointed out that the Australians did not know much about him, which also expressed his dissatisfaction with the Australian society. If Wang Gungwu, who was born and raised in Southeast Asia and lived in China for only two years, could not identify himself culturally with Australia, we are facing the same difficulty today. However, the good news is that Australia has become a theoretically multicultural country, and we have the ability to bring our own culture into Australian society.
After living in Hong Kong for 10 years, Mr. Wang Gungwu chose to leave this China-connected society two years before the handover and settled in Singapore, a Chinese-dominated but multicultural country, which can be said to be a great inspiration to us as well.
Is it because he thinks Hong Kong will change drastically after 1997? Or did he feel that the Chinese culture in Hong Kong was different from what he had imagined or expected, or for other reasons, we do not know. However, from his research on Chinese culture, he seldom takes materials from China or Hong Kong, which shows that Wang Gungwu’s Chinese culture does not only cover China and Hong Kong, but also can be found among the Chinese in Southeast Asia. It can be said that it is not Wang Gungwu’s view that Chinese culture is all that exists in China today, nor is it true that it is similar to it.
Promoting Chinese Culture in Australia
Wang Gungwu has finally linked his life to Singapore, a Chinese-dominated political entity that was not built according to the traditional Chinese political model and was open to other ethnic groups. Singapore chose to use English as the national lingua franca, but listed Chinese, Malay, and Tamil as official languages, demonstrating the characteristics of a pluralistic society, yet emphasizing Chinese culture. This is exactly what we should think about in Australia today.
In order to become a member of this multicultural society, we cannot communicate only in Chinese (no matter it is Putonghua or Cantonese). When we immigrate to Australia, we have to be able to communicate with Westerners at least, and learning basic English is something we cannot avoid. However, whether or not we can turn our Chinese language skills into an advantage in Australian society depends on whether or not we try our best to promote Chinese language to the mainstream society.
Today, many schools that teach Chinese are only teaching Chinese to the next generation, rather than promoting Chinese to the whole Australian population, which is in fact limiting the status and role of Chinese in Australia. If more Westerners can participate in Chinese community activities, it is an important direction for us to maintain and promote Chinese culture.