Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order:  Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wang Gungwu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.

So, Billy K.L., John Fitzgerald, Huang Jianli, and James K. Chin, eds.

Reviewed by Yow Cheun  Hoe
East Asian  Institute
National University  of Singapore

This collection of writings was published in 2003 as an honor presented to Professor Wang Gungwu on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2000.  From 1957 when he came back to teach in University of Malaya to the present at which he is directing the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, Professor Wang has moved across different countries, produced numerous writings, given many speeches and lectures, and supervised many students.  This festschrift shows the imprints and influences Prof Wang has made on friends and scholars along his career and life paths.

As a lifelong friend of Professor Wang since they both were students in London in 1954, Philip A. Kuhn did a good job in the prologue to trace how Professor Wang’s scholarship grew over the years.  Kuhn starts with a question “Can it be coincidence that the historian of the Overseas Chinese, who achieved the most comprehensive of his subject, is the most firmly grounded in the history of China itself,” and then leads readers to go through the importance and influential pieces Professor Wang wrote.  Along the journey of Professor Wang’s works, Kuhn convincingly shows that Professor Wang has greatly contributed to a better understanding of China, Chinese migrants, and Southeast Asia and thus the answer to the question is a clear yes.

In the epilogue, based on in-depth interviews with Professor Wang, Lee Guan-kin records the bitter and sweet times that Professor Wang experienced, from his childhood and youth in Malaya, university student days in Nanjing and London, and academic lives in Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.  This is a period fraught with many historical events and Lee has successfully transcribed Professor Wang’s personal feelings towards and scholarly insights into the transition and changes that took place in the region.  Perhaps what would make the epilogue or the whole book livelier is to interweave the writings with Professor Wang’s photos from his young time to present.

Between the prologue and epilogue are the essays written by scholars who were once taught and advised for their graduate studies by Professor Wang over his years in Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.  They were structured into four parts; the first two parts address the question of “power,” while the remaining two explore the question of “identity.”  Both questions, actually, is the two major concerns of Professor Wang’s scholarship on China and Chinese diaspora.

The first part, “In Search of Power: Power Restructuring in Modern China,” contained fours essays.  Lee Kam-keung’s “The Fujianese Revolutionaries, 1895-1911,” So Wai-chor’s “Nation, Territory and Frontier: Chiang Kai-shek’s Realism in Action,” and Huang Jianli’s “The Kuomintang Peace Mission on the Eve of the Communist Takeover,” each with their specific focus, examine how different historical actors, Qing government, foreign colonial forces, Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist Party, fought each other to seize power over China before the People’s Republic of China was eventually founded in 1949.  Jane Lee, “The New Positioning of Hong Kong after Reunification with Mainland China,” explores Hong Kong’s struggle, from 1985 to 2002, to balance between being unique from and forging connectedness to the mainland within the “One Country, Two Systems” framework.

With the title “In Search of Power: State Power vs. Economy and Society in Modern China,” the second part deals with power pursuit from a micro or social perspective.  In “A Biographical Sketch of Liu Xuexun,” Ho Hon-wai illustrates how an individual with roles of gambling operator, tax-farmer, mandarin-capitalist, secret agent, and emissary attained economic strength and political power amidst the major historical changes from the late Qing period to the Republican eras.  Terry Narramore focuses on journalists in the Republic period.  His “Illusions of Autonomy?” addresses the struggle and problem to maintain the objectivity and independence of journalism as a profession that had to deal with commercial needs, the rise of nationalism, and the crisis of Japanese militarism.  In “Chinese Nationalism and Democracy during the War Period, 1937-1945,” Edmund S.K. Fung examines both conceptual problems and empirical limitations of the well-known thesis of Chinese philosopher Li Zehou that “anti-imperialist nationalism prevails over enlightenment (jiuwang-qiwang).  He puts forwards a modification of the thesis to further take into account the liberal forces that reconciled the external imperatives of jiuwang with the internal prerequisites of qimeng.

The third part, “In Search of Chineseness: Identity of a Nation,” discusses the variegated facets of Chinese identity in different contexts.  Billy K.L. So’s “Negotiating Chinese Identity in Five Dynasties Narratives” is an account of identity as reflected in the narratives on the non-Han rulers written in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.  In “Treaties, Politics and the Limits of Local Diplomacy in Fuzhou in the Early 1850s,” Ng Chin-Keong brings readers to a particular locality where Christianity and its interaction with Chinese culture are put to test.  Providing a critical examination on Orientalism in Sinology, Adrian Chan “On Being Chinese” shows how Chinese and Chinese identities are perceived by others.

The fourth part has the title “In Search of Chineseness: Community and Self.” James Chin shows how the returned Overseas Chinese communities formed with new identities in Hong Kong.  Jennifer Jay examines what cultural and political identities mean to North American Chinese communities as reflected in the literature of the Chinese Canadian diaspora.  In “Langxian’s ‘Siege at Yangzhou,” Antonia Finnane studies a tale written in the Ming about an extended siege of Yangzhou in the dying decades of the Tang and argues that the tale is a product of late Ming political and cultural anxieties.  Focusing on Liang Qichao’s writing on the subject of ‘slavery’ during his sojourn in Australia, John Fitzgerald examines how the Chinese intellectuals in the late imperial era debated about China’s struggle for national liberation with respect to the relative merits of hierarchy and equality.

With all these essays, this festschrift is a fascinating bookmark of Professor Wang’s scholarship, from which we can trace how others scholars received his inspiration particularly on the subjects of “Power” and “Identity” pertaining to the Chinese world order.