Rethinking Chinese History in a Global Age——An Interview with Wang Gungwu

Abstract

As a Chinese boy who was being introduced to many aspects of ancient Chinese history at home by my parents, my formal and informal historical worlds never met. So there was no collusion between the two. Both the British and the Chinese in Malaya at the time did not want to excite our young minds with too many details about earlier Anglo-Chinese conflicts. There was enough nationalistic rhetoric around among the Chinese, and the British were happy to leave the emotional outbursts to be directed against the Japanese invading China. In any case, my history teacher in school was dull and perfunctory while my father's strong love of early Chinese literature and history was infectious. There was really no contest. I was bitten by the stories drawn from the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuoshi chunqiu) and Sima Qian's Records of History and other tales of courage and talent that were meant to attract the young to admire a splendid civilization. I sometimes wonder what might have been had my education been more balanced, for example, if the British had concentrated on the great classical stories from Greece and Rome that they taught the children of their own elites rather than on what their sailors, soldiers and merchants did to expand their empire. Later in my studies at university, I did find the ancient world of the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean fascinating but, by that time, I was leaning towards the study of Chinese history.