Wang Gungwu and Malaysia
Editors: Danny Wong Tze Ken & Lee Kam Hing
Publisher: University of Malaya Press, 2021
When Anthony Reid, the renowned Australian scholar and author of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (1990), reminisces about his first job at Universiti Malaya’s (UM) History Department under its then young and dynamic Malaysian head, Prof Wang Gungwu, he recalls how “we younger lecturers dreamed of how Gungwu ... should before long be at least ... Foreign Minister, if not more”.
It was not to be. Prof Wang left the university in 1968 and went on to make an indelible mark on three other top universities in the region: the Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Hong Kong, where he served as Vice-Chancellor, and the National University of Singapore, where he is still based.
Malaysia lost the best Foreign Minister we never had; the world gained a historian of exceptional distinction.
His magisterial oeuvre is based on a profound personal and historical knowledge of the multiple and interconnected worlds of China, South-East Asia and the West, leavened with an intellectual sensitivity and self-reflective empathy, and a fluent command of the English language that makes his work easy to devour, even for the non-historian.
In the age of YouTube, Prof Wang is, if not widely read, widely listened to, by a general public in Malaysia that recognise in him what one of their best could become.
The 16 chapters written here in commemoration of his 90th birthday by colleagues and friends (all his colleagues seem, almost without exception, to have become friends) range from the highly personal to the seriously academic, and are, without exception, well worth reading, testimony to the man being honoured but also to the two editors who put this Festschrift together in what was obviously a labour of love.
Khasnor Johan, Lim Teck Ghee, Stephen Leong and Reid provide engaging accounts of what UM’s History Department was like for undergraduates, postgraduates and staff in those heady days of promise, when the nation was as young as the professor himself.
Just 32 in 1963, when appointed professor of History and the first Malaysian head of the History Department, Prof Wang created an intellectual environment where “history was a prestigious subject to take” (Khasnor). Due perhaps to the standards of teaching and research he set, the calibre of the men and women he recruited, the commitment to the national project his own scholarship displayed, the relaxed camaraderie the professor and his wife’s generous hospitality promoted – these personal recollections provide an important record of the institutional history of the nation’s first and oldest university and of what it was meant to achieve.
Prof Wang – who was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, and raised in Ipoh – is a professional historian of China but his writings on Malaysian politics and on the Nanyang Chinese have been seminal for the field. Several of the papers in this Festschrift review the issues he has raised.
Lee Kam Hing provides an excellent overview of Wang’s analysis of three main themes in Malaysian politics: Malaysian nationalism, the Chinese community, and relations among elites. He shows the larger political context of Prof Wang’s thinking on these issues, and the relevance of the models he had proposed for an understanding of Malaysian politics today.
Mavis Puthucheary and Tan Chee Beng extend this debate on nationalism, the dilemmas of nation-building and the identity of Malaysian Chinese in their respective contributions.
Puthucheary, who herself has had a front seat view of a long half-century of Malaysian political life, identifies and assesses three key moments in Malaysian history when organisations formed by individuals from different ethnic backgrounds attempted to institute a non-sectarian politics of nationalism that would counter the ethnic politics behind both unvarnished Malay nationalism as well as the attenuated Malayan nationalism (“Malay nationalism enclosed by the ideal of Malay-Chinese-Indian partnership”) posited by Prof Wang. These were UM’s Socialist Club in the 1950s, the political party Gerakan of the 1960s, and PKR, formed in 1999. Her analysis, born of close insider knowledge and keen academic reflection, is worth a close read, its somewhat pessimistic conclusion attenuated by some concrete recommendations for moderating the ethnicised majoritarian politics which has come to dominate the polity.
Continuing the theme of nationalism and nation-building, Tan Chee Beng, a noted anthropologist who has spent the last two decades of his academic career as a professor at one of China’s leading universities, compares the different national unity policies adopted in Malaysia and China, especially with respect to the position of minorities and the role of elites. He argues that China’a success in uniting, to a large extent, the country lies in the non-sectarian approach it has taken to its development and modernisation policies and reaffirms, with Prof Wang, the key role that political leadership plays in both countries in attaining the goal of nation-building and development.
The remaining papers, which reflect on the implications of Prof Wang’s work on Malaysia and its politics of nation-building, raise a further consequential theme: the contestations over history in the name of the nation, an issue Prof Wang alluded to in 1965 when he wrote, “The past has much to teach us if we choose to learn from it, but we cannot hope to learn from the false and the self-deceiving” (Khasnor).
Lim makes a forceful condemnation of the false and the self-deceiving in the teaching of a state-authored history curriculum in the national education system; Barbara Watson Andaya delivers a delightful exposition of how schoolchildren in the Perak of Prof Wang’s childhood could have been taught local history and identity in the most vivid and meaningful way through a stroll around the tin mines strewn all over the state, drawing attention to, and drawing on, the country’s rich resources of physical and cultural wealth; and Phillip Koh muses on the criteria for judgement when history is brought to the courtroom, as in the case of MP Mohamad Sabu’s re-telling of the attack on Bukit Kepong in Johor.
There remains the question of the Chinese presence in Malaysia, on which Prof Wang wrote pioneering papers. Loh Wei Leng reprises the literature on Chinese migration to the Nanyang, focusing on the Peranakan Chinese in Penang. The ensuing Sino-Malayan encounter is examined in fascinating depth and detail from an environmental point of view by Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells. Danny Wong Tze Ken shows how, in the course of the long sojourn and settlement in the country, Chinese dialect identity has evolved in response to changing national and international political, economic and cultural forces.
To complete the Wang Gungwu and Malaya round-up, there are two papers on the non-Chinese world: Abu Talib Ahmad’s laudable attempt to reconstruct a social history of Malay Muslims in Pahang during the Japanese Occupation of WWII, based on the records of the Office of the Tengku Besar Pahang; and Leonard Y. Andaya’s similar attempt to reconfigure a history of the Orang Laut and the Malays through a perspective from the sea, namely the “negara selat”, that unified body of water throughout South-East Asia which was the maritime home and resource base of the Orang Laut.
The final two chapters gesture toward Prof Wang’s stature as a China scholar and the role he has played as bridge-builder in explaining China to the West and vice-versa (Peter TC Chang), and in calling into question theoretical models of state behaviour in fields such as International Relations which posit universal assumptions of rationality and power relations regardless of specificities of history and culture (Anthony Milner).
This Festschrift in honour of arguably the most distinguished scholar Malaysia can almost claim as its own, serves up a rich and varied feast of reflections on issues which remain of central concern to the country today. Wang Gungwu and Malaysia is a book not just for professional historians but for all those with a stake in the on-going contestations over the history of Malaysia.
Diana Wong is a sociologist who is currently researching the history of Kepong, Kuala Lumpur.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Get 20% OFF The Star Digital Access
Cancel anytime. Ad-free. Unlimited access with perks.
