Wang Gungwu is an internationally renowned historian famed for his scholarship on the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, as well as the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia.
In his illustrious academic career, Wang has held eminent appointments in various universities and organisations around the world.
He was a history professor at the University of Malaya (1963–68) and the Australian National University (1968–86), and the vice-chancellor at the University of Hong Kong (1986–95). He is currently a professor emeritus at the Australian National University and a University Professor at the National University of Singapore.
Keith 00:00:45
Geography has returned to the forefront of geopolitical discussion. And history, for the most part, has been shaped by the maritime. When you look at the US and China today, these two superpowers, how did the maritime shape their trajectories?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:01:39
Put very simply, of course, the maritime powers of Western Europe and the North Atlantic have been dominant for 500 years. In contrast, China has been a continental power for thousands of years and never paid much attention to naval matters. They would just have some coastal shipping to deal with piracy and a bit of coastal disturbance from time to time. But they never had a professional navy. They never thought anybody could really attack them from the sea.
And in the nineteenth century, to their surprise, a few dozen ships — British ships based in Southeast Asia, coming across the Indian Ocean — could attack them, defeat them, and extract from them concessions which rendered the whole Chinese economy subordinate to the capitalist system, something that they never understood. Nothing like that had ever happened to China before. The Industrial Revolution itself was at the back of this naval power that the British, and later the French, joined by others, were able to bring across to Southeast Asia to attack China. And for the first time they realised that the enemy can attack you by sea, and these sea enemies can defeat you.
That is a lesson they learned very late, in the late 19th century. Before they really fully understood that, they were defeated by the Japanese, who were very quick to respond because they were an island power. They saw straight away the importance of sea power, and they straight away learned from the British. At the end of the 19th century, in 1894–95, to everybody’s surprise, they destroyed the limited naval force the Chinese had and defeated the Chinese absolutely. From then onwards, for a whole hundred years, the Chinese had no navy to speak of. It’s not until the end of the 20th century that they had enough money to build the kind of ships they needed to defend a vast coastline all the way from Manchuria down to Vietnam.
To defend such a long coastline, you need a big navy. And they could not afford to do that. The economy was in such a mess through the nineteenth century. And they were invaded by the Japanese up to 1945. After that, the Nationalists lost to the Communists, and the Communists were a completely continental force, entirely a land-based People’s Liberation Army. Not a ship. They didn’t have a single ship. They didn’t have admirals or a naval force at all. Not in the air, not in the sea. An entirely land force defeated the Nationalists.
But then immediately they realised they needed a navy, because they were blockaded. They couldn’t take Taiwan, they couldn’t control the seas. But they had no money to build a navy. It really needed the Deng Xiaoping reforms of the 1980s onwards to develop a stronger economy, making use of the capitalist system as best as they could, until they could have enough wealth to seriously build a navy.
You may have heard the story that their first serious attempt to build a modern navy was when they bought a second-hand aircraft carrier from Ukraine in 1997 and ‘98, which the Ukrainian people were about to dismantle and give away. So the Chinese bought it to learn how to build an aircraft carrier. That was 1998. And we’re now talking about twenty-odd years. Look at how quickly they have developed it. But we have to bear in mind the navy is a new thing to the Chinese.
The Americans have inherited the Anglo-French naval powers of the nineteenth century, and America has become the world’s most powerful naval force. They control all the oceans. They have aircraft carriers in every ocean. And with all those hundreds of years behind them — not just America alone, the Anglo-American tradition from the East India Company of the seventeenth century onwards. So they are a fantastic naval power. To talk in terms of a naval threat to the Americans can’t be serious. They’re not in the same league. But the point is the Chinese are focusing on maritime power. They want to make sure they can never again be attacked successfully by sea.
Keith 00:06:52
On that note, I wanted to ask a follow-up question. If you look at the 1400s, everyone knows about Zheng He and his expeditions. At that point, one could argue that China could potentially have emerged as a naval power.
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:07:09
Yes. In fact, they built a navy in the Song Dynasty when they were trying to defend themselves from continental powers, because the Song Dynasty was near the coast. So they built a navy based on the skills of the southern Chinese who were sailors, like the Hokkiens and the Zhejiang people. Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong had merchants who were going to sea all the time, but they were merchants. But they were all very good at sea.
And the Song actually developed a navy. In fact, the navy was used by the Mongols to attack Java and to try to attack Japan, except they were defeated by the tsunami, and they attacked Vietnam by sea. So the Mongols made use of that navy. But that did not make China a naval power or make them conscious of the naval dangers from the sea.
So when the Ming Dynasty inherited the navy, and the second emperor inherited the Mongol interest in finding out whether there were enemies anywhere, they sent Zheng He to find out if there were enemies coming by sea — whether the Mongol Timurid Empire could actually come by sea to attack them. Seven times he went out, and he came back to say there are no enemies out there.
So then what did they do? They destroyed all the ships and burnt all the records pertaining to the Zheng He expeditions. All this history of Zheng He was reconstructed from fragments of history which were found here and there. But the official records of those expeditions were destroyed together with the ships. They were actually destroyed. Because what they said was, that’s a waste of money, there are no enemies out there. We will use all that money to defend ourselves against the Mongols by building a Great Wall. And they built a Great Wall. The Great Wall we see today was built by the Ming Dynasty from the 15th century onwards because they were being regularly attacked by the Mongols.
Keith 00:09:15
One could easily imagine an alternative trajectory of history if, for example, he saw that there were potential threats. But because there weren’t immediate threats during that period of time, they just said, there are not going to be threats, so let’s forget about the whole endeavour.
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:09:34
They went further, if I may add. The Ming Dynasty forbade Chinese from trading overseas. All those Chinese merchants were stopped from trading overseas. What they said was, if the foreigners want to trade with us, they can come. They bring gifts to us, an exchange of gifts to show that they are not unfriendly. That is what they call a tributary system. They call it a tributary system, but it’s not really a tributary system. It was a gift exchange system to show that you are friendly. Because if you bring a gift, you’re friendly, and we will give you a gift in return, then you can trade with us. You can come and trade with us, but we don’t allow our people to go out to trade with you.
That was the Ming Dynasty policy. For two hundred years the southern merchants couldn’t trade overseas. In fact, if they did, they were illegals, and if they were caught, they were executed by the Ming Dynasty.
Keith 00:10:35
Why is that so? Why was there this kind of attitude to not be outward-going? What informed the leaders, the rulers, the emperors?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:10:47
The Ming founder was a very suspicious man. And he was very suspicious of all those seafaring people along the coast of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, all the way to Guangdong, who were not supporters of him. He came from the continent. He was suspicious of them. He thought that they cooperated with or served the interests of foreign powers. And he didn’t trust them at all because they were just making money — merchants, you know.
And the emperor found that — why is it necessary for us to go? We don’t need that trade. If the foreigners need trade, let them come. But why do our people need to go out and trade with them? So he decided that the safest way for the security of the country was that nobody should go out.
And that was passed. For two hundred years, that was maintained very strictly. They did relax it here and there, now and again, when the Portuguese came. But then what they did was they said, the Portuguese can run Macau and do all the trade by Macau. Chinese cannot go out to trade. The foreigners come to Macau to trade with the Chinese. That’s how Macau was founded.
Keith 00:12:01
[Series Message]
We are living through one of the most consequential periods in history today. There are new powers, new rules, and new risks emerging as we speak. And most of the important structural changes that will affect the world in the coming century are happening right here in our neighbourhood, Asia. In collaboration with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, we’ve brought together the region’s leading experts on strategic affairs to help you understand the structural forces at play.
Together we will extract lessons from the past and analyse the present clearly so that we can make better decisions for the future. We hope this will help you see what this means for Singapore in a coming multipolar world.
[Conversation resumes]
So China was perhaps obsessed with the continent. It was very focused on the inland. Can you talk to me more about why there was such a huge obsession with bordering their country with the Great Wall? Why was there such a huge focus inland across the different dynasties?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:13:06
Because from the very beginning of Chinese history, the enemies of the Chinese centralised bureaucratic state based on the Yellow River all came from land. They came from the north, from the north-east, from the north-west, from the west. They were the ancestors of the Manchus, Mongols, Turks, Tibetans, and — what do you call it — Indo-Europeans who were in Central Asia. And then later on the Arabs and the Persians. They were all attacking China from the land.
Nobody attacked China from the sea at all. There is no record of any enemies coming from the sea. And they didn’t reach the sea, the southern coast, until the third century BC, the Qin Empire. Then they conquered the south. They conquered the Hundred Yue. Then they reached the coast, and they stopped. That was a border, a very safe border. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Now we can concentrate all our resources on defending ourselves from the enemies who regularly come from the west.
And they did. During the fourth and fifth century, the whole of North China was conquered by these miscellaneous tribes, ranging from, as I said, the ancestors of the Manchus, the Mongols, Turks, Tibetans. They conquered large parts of North China. It took the Tang Dynasty finally to make China one again, to unite all of China. But the Tang Dynasty itself was partly descended from all these conquerors. They were, you might say, Turkic descendants who intermarried with the Chinese and, after three or four hundred years, became Chinese again. And they ran the Tang Dynasty.
Keith 00:15:05
If we were to go across the ocean to America, it was not obvious or a given, if we look back at America at its time of birth, that it would emerge as the world’s leading maritime power — that they would literally run all the oceans across the world. How do we explain the rise of America as the world’s leading maritime power today?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:15:30
I think they had the great advantage of inheriting the East India Company’s tradition. Don’t forget, when America was settled, it was settled by two main types of people. One were the dissidents who were dissatisfied with the Church of England. For religious reasons, they went out to look for a place for their own faith. So they went out to settle in New England. Others were linked up with the East India Companies and West India Companies of the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Portuguese fighting in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. You read about Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada — they were fighting over how to control the Americas. Then the Spanish controlled the South, and the English and the French took over North America. The French had the Mississippi and Missouri, and the English settled on the coast.
And what was America? America was a bunch of Englishmen: dissidents on the one side, and, you might say, the descendants of pirates and naval people on the other side, who linked up with the East India trade and the trade in slaves. A major item of trade was slavery in the Atlantic. And they were the descendants of those. They set up plantations with the slaves, and the dissidents set up New England into a very religious and very Christian world. Together they were thirteen separate colonies. They were very different. Each of those colonies was autonomous and had its own system of government.
But then they rebelled against England, largely because the East India Company did something which the American people didn’t like — the Tea Party, what they call the Tea Party, over taxes. They were dissatisfied with the way the British were sending governors to the colonies whom they didn’t like and disagreed with.
In the meantime, Europe had developed a new set of values. And this is very crucial to modern history: the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment of the French developed the idea that you could have a country that was not ruled by kings, emperors, priests, archbishops, and aristocrats, but ruled by the citizens themselves. That ideal led to the French Revolution. But it was the same ideal that inspired Americans like Jefferson and others to revolt against the British. And so at about the same time, these were the first two nation states in the world: the French nation state and the American one.
But the French state had tremendous difficulty because they were living in a world of empires still. They produced Napoleon. It took the French five republics before they became the Fifth Republic of today. The Americans, however, once they got rid of the English, had thirteen colonies united, defending themselves against the English and the French — and the French helped them against the English, because the French and the English were rivals — and they created a new nation, a new set of ideals based on the equality of every citizen in the thirteen. Of course, only the whites — not the slaves, not the Red Indians, only the whites. But they developed a constitution which established all these principles about equality, about individual rights, the pursuit of happiness, and it was all drawn from the French Enlightenment.
But the French themselves couldn’t do it because the European situation was very different. In fact, as you know, the French revolutionaries were all executed. They had their heads cut off, and they produced an emperor. But the thirteen colonies created, we might say, the first modern nation state that remained a nation state, that continued to expand and re-emphasise a new kind of empire.
In fact, empires never went away. What happened was, instead of being royal empires ruled by aristocrats with no real question of nationality, they became national empires. The Dutch, the English, and the French all had East India Companies, and all of them eventually, in the nineteenth century, became the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, and the French Empire — the empire of the nation of the British people, the French people, and the Dutch people. So “national empire” is not a contradiction in terms. They’re empires based on the idea that a nation is a superior way of running a country of citizens with equal rights. A fantastic new idea. A revolutionary idea.
Keith 00:20:48
As we talk about nations and empires, there is another term that’s returning to the fore today in public discourse, which is the word civilisation. I’ve spoken to someone like yourself, I’ve spoken to someone like Ho Kwon Ping, who talks about this idea of a civilisational reset. We tend to describe the US and China in modern terms as superpowers, as economies, as nation states.
But there is also this idea that they are civilisational in their being, or that they represent civilisations to a certain extent. You’re an expert in civilisations. How should one understand that term in the modern context today?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:21:30
You see, words like civilisation and culture are very modern words. They have roots in Latin and Greek. Civilisation derived from civic societies. Culture derived from, linked to, agriculture, land, the use of land, and so on. But these words are very modern words and describe modern conditions. But they have deep roots.
Anthropologists of the last century have described these words more carefully and distinguished between what is culture and what is civilisation in a way that I find very enlightening. For example, they have discovered that everybody has culture. Even the most primitive tribe has culture, its own culture. And it can distinguish the tribe in one valley, having a distinct culture — a distinct language, religion, faith, and so on — from the people in the next valley. Different culture. And where they meet in a jungle in the middle, they are supposed to kill each other. They have no clear borders, but they have a kind of cultural border between this culture and that culture. Every tribe had that. And some of these tribes grew and became larger and larger terrains, but they had a distinct thing about a culture being something that you defended for yourself. It’s your own culture, very different from somebody else’s culture.
But civilisation is different. Civilisation has no borders. Civilisation is simply a set of extraordinary new ideas, exceptionally enlightening, illuminating, highly inspiring in its understanding of our humanity — what human beings are like, what we aspire to, the kind of world that we would like to live in, the next world, the world after life, after death, speculating about what are the wonders of being alive as human beings. A lot of imagination of brilliant people. And they create a civilisation based on certain civic values in a settled population which has surpluses, which can create wealth to build a state, and then they imagine all these things. But they imagine those ideas without borders. They’re not based on cultural distinction between one culture and another culture. They’re above it — supra, as it were.
Civilisation has no borders; culture has borders. Once you can see this distinction, then what happens? After the Enlightenment century, in the 19th century particularly, with the creation of the nation states and empires and so on, they developed the idea that a nation has borders. Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea was you must have borders in order to avoid war, because the Catholics and the Protestants were killing each other. They had no borders. Religion had no borders. So the Catholics and Protestants were killing each other. So Westphalia invented the idea of the border. You mustn’t cross this border. Within this border, a people will have something to share, and you have a border. Once that border is drawn and you don’t cross the border, there will be peace.
Out of that came the idea of nations. Within this border, we create a nation, you create a nation, and the idea of a distinctive national identity emerged. And that drew the line between national borders. People talk about French culture, British culture, German culture — that’s different. But civilisation applies to all of them. They’re all part and parcel of this Enlightenment, modern civilisation that was created out of the late 18th century. So if you don’t distinguish between culture and civilisation, you’ll get all confused, and it is very hard to explain anything.
So when we use civilisation today, we must distinguish it from culture, because culture has been very clearly identified with nation states. Every nation now says it has its own culture. But you can’t say you have your own civilisation. Nobody says that. People tried to do that. I remember books from the 19th century which talk about French civilisation, but they meant French culture; and British civilisation, but they actually meant British culture. If you distinguish it, that is actually a national culture. But civilisation covers them both. The British and the French, the Americans, the Germans — they’re all inheritors of a modern civilisation.
And what happens then? Because it has no borders, people can borrow and select and learn from each other’s civilisations. You can even learn from each other’s cultures, but with cultures, people say, this belongs to us, it’s not yours, it’s mine. Nobody says that about civilisation. With civilisation, if it’s very good — brilliant ideas, tremendous technology, some completely new way of looking at the world — you borrow.
The best example that I know is China, when they took Buddhism from India. A completely new set of ideas. When the Chinese met the first Buddhist monks who arrived in China and heard them, they found that these ideas were totally unknown to the Chinese, completely new. They were so fascinated, they decided to take it. Bit by bit, they took it, and then they were not satisfied with the early translations. They sent their own monks to India to get the sutras, the actual sutras, bring them back, and retranslate them in terms which the Chinese could understand. In the course of which it became sinicised. It became understandable in Chinese to the Chinese people of Chinese civilisation.
So Buddhism — Mahayana Buddhism — was absorbed into Chinese civilisation. And today, when we talk about Chinese civilisation, it naturally includes the Buddhist civilisation. Every Chinese has some bit of Buddhist in him. He doesn’t have to practise it, but the ideas are already part and parcel of Chinese civilisation. And this applies also to Japan and Korea, which took their Buddhism through China. And they also developed, particularly in Japan, their own interpretation of Buddhism. But again, it came all the way from India. It just goes to show it is borderless. Then later on the Burmese, the Thais, all of them could take it from India. Even though India lost it. They gave it up at that time. But other people took it. And now they’re recovering it. There are Indians now who recognise that Buddhism has fantastic things to offer. It did offer much to the enrichment of Indian civilisation itself. That goes to show that civilisation without borders really shows how civilisation functions. The word then really means something.
So when we talk about civilisation today, you can say that America represents the peak of power of Western Europe and North Atlantic civilisation. Chinese civilisation is what remains of an ancient civilisation that has now been, you might say, threatened, or has undergone tremendous changes because of modernisation — particularly modernisation in the name of nation states. That has completely transformed that civilisation into something that’s more like national culture.
Today, for example, that Chinese civilisation, which was without borders, was taken by the Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, and so on, and each of them has called it Vietnamese national culture, Korean national culture, Japanese national culture. So what remains in China as Chinese civilisation has now become Chinese national culture, because the Chinese, in modernising themselves, adopted the whole principle of a modern nation state, including the idea of national borders, sovereignty, independence, its own state and its own borders. Very clear. Once you draw those borders the way the Chinese have drawn them today, exactly the same as other nation states, they’re no longer a civilisation by itself.
They are trying to call it a civilisation state because that was how it arose, but it’s no longer a Chinese civilisation that can be separated from the Chinese state. The Chinese state and the Chinese civilisation have become one. And you can call it Chinese national culture if you like.
Keith 00:31:00
There’s such a tension in the world that we live in today, because nations by definition have borders and civilisations don’t. How does one manage that contradiction of being a civilisation?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:31:11
That is one of the difficulties today. The United States and China today are facing each other as nations. When President Trump talks about making America great again, the Chinese have been saying that for the last hundred years. Because China had been great before and nearly got destroyed in the late 19th century and early 20th century, almost completely wiped out. They were so threatened. And what they wanted to do, since the generation of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, and all of them — all of them wanted to make China great again.
So President Trump and President Xi Jinping today are actually thinking in the same way. Make America great again, make China great again. They’re talking about powerful nation states who happen to be the most powerful in the world, representing two ancient civilisations in their modern form. One derived all the way from Western Europe — you can go right back to the Mediterranean. The other derived from the Yellow River civilisation of five thousand years ago. They derive from civilisations, but they’ve become fantastically powerful modern nation states.
Keith 00:32:24
How do these two separate civilisations affect the way they govern historically? I thought this was a very interesting example from one of your essays, where you talk about the idea that in China there was no idea of a holy book — that knowledge was seen as a man-made construct that was evaluated over time. You look at your classics, your histories, your philosophies, and then your records. So at the core of documentation, there’s no idea of this holy book. You have to see knowledge in that utilitarian sense of, does it actually help you govern?
But in Western civilisation, there is this idea that you have the corpus of holy text — one thinks about the Bible, for example. So obviously this has certain effects on the way these two nation states have traditionally governed themselves.
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:33:24
Among the origins of these two states, there’s one very crucial difference which I think remains significant today. One is derived from the idea of monotheism, that there is only one God. And therefore, if there’s only one God, there’s only one truth. And derived from the idea that there’s only one truth, the idea evolved that every individual is equal before God, before the one God.
Now, that is totally unknown to the Chinese. The civilisation that developed on the Yellow River concentrates on something completely different. It is based on the necessity of good governance of a vast plain which was flooded all the time. Every year, the floods of the Yellow River destroyed everything in their wake, and people had to fight this. Even though they fought it differently at different points of the river, they never succeeded. So what they needed was to bring everybody together to create a complete system that was so well organised that they could control the floods and make sure the floods did least damage to people. And to do that, they created a bureaucratic centralised state.
And as some people joke about this, the great hero, the mythic hero of China, was a hydraulic engineer: Yu of Xia, Emperor Yu. He became an emperor because he was the one who organised all the people to fight the floods together, not separately. And he devised the idea of everybody learning about the methodology of controlling floods, as hydraulic engineering. They succeeded by linking up every one of these groups of people under one set of bureaucrats, officials who were experts in dealing with the floods. And that became the basis of a central bureaucratic state.
And they found that to be the most useful to deal with other things as well. They found that it was also useful for defending against enemies from outside, and for defending against natural disasters of different kinds — locusts, agricultural floods elsewhere, climate change, and all that. Everything could be solved if your central bureaucratic state was efficient under a ruler who was caring, who really cared for the people, who was constantly trying to find better means of making sure that people lived happy lives, or at least that they would not be destroyed by natural disasters and foreign wars and so on.
So over all that time, centuries of development, they developed the idea that the ruler, as a good ruler, has a mandate of heaven. And that mandate was given to him because he was a good man who cared for the people. The moral values of a good man become central. All this led finally to somebody like Confucius drawing it all together to say that the secret of good governance is to have a moral responsibility for caring for the people. But you need good emperors. A good emperor has a mandate of heaven. When he fails, when he’s a bad emperor, the people have the right to rebel against him, overthrow him, and give the mandate to a new ruler. So in the end, the mandate of heaven is actually determined by the people being satisfied with good governance.
So good governance and moral leadership by a caring ruler became the central theme of that civilisation. Without any reference to God. This mandate of heaven is a cosmic thing, and ultimately it represented the people’s will. If you failed to satisfy the people, the people will rebel against you and replace you. Therefore the mandate of heaven is actually determined by the people, who have the right to rebel.
So that set of ideas is absolutely, completely different. And in that set of ideas, the fundamental thing was that it works best if it has a hierarchy — people at the top, people at the bottom — and their relationships with each other are very carefully nurtured. Everybody knew his place. Everybody knew what he had to do to enable the system to be well governed. Everybody’s duties are apportioned very neatly and accurately. That’s a hierarchy of relationships.
And it derives from the very simple proposition that Confucius and Mencius put a lot of emphasis on, and that is that the most natural relationship in human life is that between parents and children. The father, mother, and the child. That’s a natural relationship. And that should be the model for the ruler. The ruler is like the father, and the people the children. So all the relationships are hierarchical. Your father is above the son, the grandson is below, then the great-grandson, other cousins, nephews — all have relationships. So you use that model for the empire. The bureaucracy itself is a hierarchy of relationships.
So the emphasis on human relationships based on moral principles, moral behaviour, good caring, concern for social harmony, and so on became central to this idea. And of course the Qin Empire developed one other thing, which is that it is not enough to be just good. You have to have laws to deter people from being bad. So they created a legalist system. They created something more: have laws. Together they became the basis of the Chinese Empire.
The monotheistic system doesn’t need that. At first it tried to do that, because the Roman Empire converted to Christianity under Constantine, and then the model was the Roman Empire. They developed a Catholic Church, which was a hierarchy. But what happened was Islam came along. And what did Islam offer? Islam offered something which was a bit more like what we call Protestantism today, because in Islam everybody can speak directly to God. Every believer in Allah can actually talk to Allah. And it’s God’s will. Everybody’s life is God’s will. Once you do that, then if everybody can speak to God, they have the right to say, this, what God tells me, is right. So you challenge the hierarchy.
And then eventually the break, in the Renaissance, between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church, which led to the Protestant movement, changed the whole of Europe and allowed for Renaissance, Reformation, to Enlightenment. That’s the way it became the modernised civilisation of today. It was a move, a removal, from the hierarchies of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church into a Protestant one, influenced to some extent by the Crusades fighting the Muslims. In the course of all that came the idea that the hierarchy of those priests — of the Catholic Church, or the Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church — is not always right. Why can’t someone talk directly to God? And that became the basis of all the innumerable Christian sects and Protestant sects that we find in the world today, each individual claiming, I spoke to God.
So monotheism became a very powerful force in reshaping a civilisation which I call the Mediterranean civilisation, because they’re all linked together. And they have one thing in common: they’re all monotheistic. Originally there were many gods. The Greco-Romans had numerous gods. All that was pushed aside. And the victory was the Jewish monotheistic system, adopted by the Christians, adopted by the Muslims, and finally adopted by the whole of the Sinic and of the Mediterranean world.
And that led to the Enlightenment. So the Enlightenment cannot be separated from this idea that there’s only one truth. Not just God — you don’t have to refer to God. There’s only one truth. And every individual has his individual rights. They become citizens, and every citizen has his rights in a nation. And then every nation has its place in the world. All these things are argued in terms which are drawn deeply from a mixture of this Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Mediterranean civilisation that somehow came together to become this powerful modern civilisation today. It did not happen in either India or China.
Keith 00:43:25
[Show Notes Message]
If you want the show notes from today’s episode, just head over to ykeith.com/rsis and you have full and free access to them.
[Conversation resumes]
I wonder how it manifests itself today. One way some of these core civilisational values manifest themselves is in the way the different governments or leaders express themselves internationally. One might say that in the US, there is this evangelical attitude — they believe their values are universal. And that derives from these Western civilisational values. Whereas in the East, and if one looks at China specifically, there is this idea that the Chinese way or the Chinese method is unique to them, and therefore it is not applicable elsewhere and they should be focused within China itself. There’s no universalist attitude.
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:44:24
I think you put your finger on it. This is what happens if you only believe in one truth. There’s one God, one truth, and you develop the idea of universal values. There’s only one set of universal values. That is a superiority. Ultimately everybody must conform to that. Universal values means it applies to everybody. So that becomes the ideal. There’s only one God, one truth, one set of universal values.
If you don’t accept that, something is wrong with you. You will threaten it. So it is my duty to defend the universal values. I have to try and persuade you otherwise. And if you won’t listen, I may have to tell you, correct you, beat you, defeat you, force you to accept those universal values. And this is what I think drives the idealism that underlies a lot of what Americans believe to be universal values. Not only Americans — Western Europeans, the whole Christian civilisation, the whole Mediterranean civilisation, including Islam. Christian, Islamic, and modern all have this ultimate idea: there’s only one truth. And it’s my job to persuade you of that truth. Because there’s only one set of universal values.
But of course they disagree among themselves about exactly what those universal values are. And they do have extremes of one form or the other — what we now call liberal, illiberal, authoritarian, liberal. All these are variations of the argument within that same debate of universal values, how much you give to one or the other. That is why I’ve always talked about there being two Wests, actually. Out of the emancipation, two brilliant ideas came out of the French: liberty and equality.
The state doesn’t think that. The state says everybody is working towards the welfare of the whole society. It’s total, in a way. It’s holistic. The whole thing is holistic — not individualistic, not particularistic. Holistic. That meant that the Chinese had tremendous difficulty understanding that. But in the end, they chose. Without great success, one chose to look at the liberal side, the American model, the Western European model; the other chose the Soviet model of the socialist Europe.
And this I would call West One and West Two. That was the division between the Nationalists and the Communists. And they fought it out. There were a lot of Chinese in between who didn’t agree with that, but these were the two groups that succeeded. And in the end, after the Japanese invasion weakened the Nationalists, the Communists won. Everybody was surprised when Mao Zedong won in 1949. Nobody expected them to win.
The Nationalists had won the war in 1945 with the help of the Americans, together as allies. The Americans were supporting them all through that 1945 to 1949 period. The Americans, the whole of Western European civilisation, were more or less on the Nationalist side. They were anti-communist. And yet Mao Zedong won. So when they won, they said: well, we’ve proven it. The Chinese people want good governance, fair governance, better distribution of wealth, and so on. None of all these rich capitalists getting richer and richer at our expense. The ordinary people — ninety per cent of the peasantry — are poor. And we have the right. And Mao Zedong led the peasants, so it was a peasant socialism. It’s not even the proletariat socialism of the Soviet Union — a peasant revolution. And we overthrew these capitalistic Chinese of the coast, and we set up a new country.
But at the end of it all, they didn’t copy the Soviet Union. Why did Mao Zedong have the Cultural Revolution? He said the Soviets didn’t get it right. Khrushchev, after Stalin, and all that — they were more and more like the West. They’re not really the egalitarian society that we are supposed to believe in in the revolution. So he wanted to find a Chinese way of interpreting socialism. That is what he tried to do. Of course, he failed too. So in the end, the Chinese were left in absolute confusion. At the end of Mao Zedong’s period, nobody knew where they were going.
So Deng Xiaoping came along and basically said: we had a revolution in 1949, we won, and then we started to make some mistakes. Now we will correct the mistakes and reform the revolution. To make the revolution successful, we have to reform it. And to reform it, we must learn from the people who have succeeded, including from the West. And so he turned to, you might say, capitalistic methods. He allowed a more open society, joined the global economy, joined the WTO, and a miracle happened. China became rich and powerful.
And so the Chinese say: yes, we’ve done it. And we did it without copying America in every respect. We took from Western civilisation, or modern civilisation, what we wanted and what we needed to become rich and powerful, without accepting the universal values of the West. We have our own moral values, we have our own core values, with a long history of thousands of years, which made us Chinese. And we don’t have to give that up.
We learned the technologies of the West, including ideology, science, technology, engineering feats, all that. We master all the technologies that they have learned and try to do better, but we keep our core values. That’s the difference. The core values are different from the core values of the one God, the evangelical tradition of that one truth, the idea of universal values. And the Chinese say, we don’t accept that. Our core values descend from the sense of good governance, moral leadership, caring for the people, wanting to make sure that people have a fair deal and a good share of the wealth and power.
Keith 00:50:58
As you said that, it reminded me of a recent interview that Ambassador Bilahari did with ThinkChina. He was making the point that the Chinese government today claims that they have broken the myth that modernisation necessarily meant westernisation. And he argued the opposite, which is that if you look at China today, a large part of it — the socialist model — was Western. Capitalism, the ideology itself, was Western. Marxist thought, Leninist thought, came from the West as well. So he was saying that adopting socialism with Chinese characteristics, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics, does not change the fact that the underlying mechanism itself is Western. But you seem to argue a different view, which is that you can modernise without being Western. So how does your view differ?
Prof Wang Gungwu 00:51:49
I think the Chinese were quite clear. They were setting out to westernise in the 1920s and so on, the May Fourth Movement. They thought modernisation was westernisation. They were willing to do it. But they discovered there were two Wests. There’s West One and West Two. And Mao Zedong’s crowd, those communists, took West Two as the model.
It’s not that they didn’t know that was the West. And the West also assumed that it was a civil war of Western civilisation. Modernisation constituted two parts. One was an emphasis on liberty; the other part was socialism, which is an emphasis on equality. Both were from the West. That was modernisation. The Chinese knew that. What differentiated it was the core. We don’t have to learn everything from the West. We only learn their technologies. Our core values remain our own. All the ideas about good governance, a model centralised bureaucratic state, the Confucian idea of a caring ruler, and all those things — they merged that into their socialism. That is what they’re trying to argue as Chinese characteristics.
In other words, they are core values of the Chinese people. We don’t have to take all the values from the West, which is individualism and so on. But that’s only West One. We don’t have to take everything from West One. We can take something from West Two. But modernisation is to take all the technologies. There is an ideological difference between West One and West Two. We would differentiate between the two. We take West Two. We don’t take West One. But our core values don’t change. Our core values are rooted in those ideals, in all those dynasties that survived for thousands of years. Those principles of good governance — where they’re still useful to us, we can select from them and keep and preserve them.
What they learned, however — the West Two part that they really emphasise, which actually West One and West Two agreed on, and they took that very seriously, and here I think they have actually advanced beyond their core values — is that they took the idea of progress seriously. The idea of progress is totally new to the Chinese. The Chinese core values do not contain the idea of progress. What the Chinese core values of Confucius emphasised was that the glorious time was in the past. That is how you explain dynastic change and the mandate of heaven. The mandate of heaven shows that we start well and it fails. And when it fails, you need a new mandate. Every time you need a new mandate, it is because you have to go back to a glorious past from which you have deteriorated. So every dynastic change is a matter of looking back to better values from which you have fallen and declined.
So given that idea, the idea of progress, when it came — even in Europe, it was very new, because the Christian Church and the Islamic Church didn’t talk about progress either. The idea of progress was an Enlightenment idea. I remember as a student being very struck by a book called The Idea of Progress. It was developed in the 18th century: the idea of material progress as being progress. Because before that, you didn’t have progress, because man remains the same. We don’t change. Spiritual needs remain the same. Moral values remain the same. So the Catholic Church, all religions, all the ancient ideals say we don’t change. Human beings are the same. And especially our spiritual needs, our moral needs, remain the same.
So what we’re talking about is material progress — scientific, technological, and especially technological. Technological progress makes us wealthier, and we can be more powerful. And then you look at the world, and this is what happened. The Westerners got there first, and therefore they dominated us for hundreds of years. Now we want to be free from them. To be free from them, we must stop being dominated. And we must acquire the technologies that they have so that we can stand up to them and be equal to them, if not better. So we learn from their ideas, their technologies.
And this they have done. No hesitation at all. So from that point of view, the question of modern or Western is not important. I would say 80 to 90 per cent of what the Chinese are doing today is modern, based on modern technology. And they have no worries about it, because they now say all these are helping us towards the idea of progress.
And where did they get the idea of progress from? From Karl Marx. Because Karl Marx took from the Enlightenment — he’s part of the Enlightenment generation — took from Hegel and so on the idea that you can have progress. The Industrial Revolution proved that you can do that. And what he showed was that you progress from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and ultimately to socialism. That’s his idea of progress. There are stages of progress. Now, whether you believe that or not doesn’t matter. The idea is that you progress from the age of slavery, feudalism, to capitalism, and he is predicting that after capitalism you’d have socialism. Rightly or wrongly, progress is in that direction.
And the Chinese now say they definitely went through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. And now we are faced with the fact that if we want socialism, we must be good capitalists first. If you are successful in capitalism, you gain the wealth, then you have the money to distribute and become good socialists. I’m oversimplifying it, but you can see the logic of it. Therefore, the idea of progress has persuaded the Chinese that this actually is better than what they had before.
It actually changes their core values — not looking to the past for all good things. Selectively, yes, but the important thing is that now you can believe you can be progressive towards the future. And if you progress towards the future, then these models that Marx suggested must be taken seriously. So they talk about socialism with Chinese characteristics, because socialism represents progress. And Chinese characteristics means that we still have some core values which can be selectively chosen because they are still necessary for us to remain Chinese — identifiably, proudly Chinese.
And therefore it comes back to the fact that as human beings, Chinese human beings, they’re still the same. They still have some sense of family, some sense of relationships, some belief that relationships matter, and so on, and some belief in hierarchy. All these things are still there in China. They don’t believe in absolute freedom. They don’t believe in absolute equality. None of these things which are emphasised by some of the extreme groups in the West today. The Chinese have never accepted it.
Keith 00:59:48
I think in 2004, Samuel Huntington argued that there was going to be a clash of civilisations. He was writing, I think, partly in response to Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, where Fukuyama saw that America, which represented the peak of Western civilisation, was going to become the sole standing civilisation in the world. And Samuel Huntington argued that it was going to be a clash.
You went further and said that it was wrong to cast China as the West’s destined enemy — that the West was not destined to conflict with China as much as with Islam, for example. And today, when we look at the US and China’s relationship, it seems to me that this is going to be a clash of civilisations. How would you read Huntington today?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:00:47
I disagreed with Huntington only on one point. Actually, I greatly admired him for one thing. He was one of the few social scientists in the West who once again began to use civilisations in the plural. Because for a long time the Western trend, or the temptation, was to talk about civilisation as a singular thing. There is only one civilisation, modern civilisation, which comes from the West. All those others are dying or decaying, obsolete, and one day will all end up in museums. Arnold Toynbee tried to show otherwise, but most social scientists didn’t take him very seriously. And when the Americans won the Cold War, it was even more obvious to someone like Francis Fukuyama and others that their civilisation had won. There’s only one civilisation; the victory of the Cold War proved that.
So Huntington was wise to point out that actually there are civilisations. He put back the S in civilisations. And I congratulated him on that because I thought he was right. But what I disagreed with was that civilisations themselves clash. I think that was wrong. Because civilisations don’t clash. It’s that the politicians and the political powers use the excuse of civilisational difference to justify what they’re fighting for. That was what the Americans have been doing, and to some extent other civilisations in the past have also tried to do — between Christianity and Islam, for example. In the name of civilisations, they use that as an excuse to fight wars. And the wars went on and on because of that. But that’s not because the civilisations themselves clash. It’s political power.
And that’s because, as I said in my review of Huntington’s book, he’s a political scientist. He could not avoid thinking that the quest for power is really behind it all. It’s political power that uses the name of civilisation to fight wars, not because civilisations clash. That’s where I disagree with him.
But actually, I met him, and we had a long chat. We didn’t really disagree when he got round to it. He admitted that, yes, the politicians would argue: this is modern civilisation, the only civilisation. This is where universal values come in. Universal means universal. Everybody must be the same. And if you’re not being the same, you are threatening the system. You’re threatening universal values. And it is our duty, our job — there’s only one truth — to make sure that your attempt to destroy the idea or to challenge the universal values is wrong-headed and should be put down. So that is what was really happening.
Keith 01:04:09
So if you look at the US–China competition today, there is this quest for political power. On one hand, we think about the Thucydides Trap, which draws from this Western civilisational understanding of power dynamics, where the hegemon will always try to quash its rising peer or its rising challenger. And you made the point — and I don’t know whether I’m getting this right — that part of what’s animating this dynamic is that there is a deep misunderstanding between the US and China. What is that deep misunderstanding?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:04:50
The misunderstanding is because Graham Allison’s use of the Thucydides Trap draws from a history written by Thucydides 2,000-odd years ago. It was a story between states. The city-states of Athens and Sparta — they were states. They were not nation states, but they were city-states, city-states with imperial ambitions, you might say, expanding, fighting each other. But they were states.
Keith 01:05:23
So how should we understand the underlying dynamics between the superpowers today? How should we interpret this rivalry?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:05:33
My understanding of China today is that they don’t want to fight America. They don’t want to take over from America. Why would they want to do that? They look at America trying to dominate the world and be hegemon. What does it cost them? Whenever they try to intervene outside of their interests, they’ve been complete failures. You must only do things for your own interest.
And your own interest in China is how to control 1.4 billion people, how to make sure that they are all well off and free from poverty and happy, that there is social harmony and stability and safety inside China, that the economy is growing, science and technology are advancing, and China’s getting wealthier and more powerful, so that it is safe and secure and nobody would ever dare to attack us ever again. Isn’t that good enough?
So I see the Chinese saying the Americans are just overdoing it. They overreach themselves and it’s doing no good to them. They may be hegemon. Yes, they are the most powerful, certainly in naval force and military terms, the most powerful in the world. Economically, they are the most dynamic still in many ways. But they want to conquer the world, they want to dominate the world. What for? Because the Chinese don’t actually believe in those universal values. They’re not out there saying there’s only one truth, and you all have to believe it, and if you don’t believe me, we have to put you down. The Chinese don’t think like that.
What they are doing is making sure that the Americans are not allowed to put the Chinese down as being just another part of America, to follow America in every way and accept all the core values that the Americans represent. Because the core values may be very good for America, and many Chinese actually admire that. The individualism, the private property, the freedom, the democracy, human rights, legal advantages, and so on — greatly admired by a lot of Chinese. But then they look at China and they say, when they introduce that into China, it doesn’t work in China. It makes China weak. They find that the Chinese will fight among themselves, and then China will be weak.
To many Chinese, and particularly to the leaders who form the hundred million members of the Chinese Communist Party, they are disciplined to believe that China, to be safe and secure, cannot go that way. If you go that way — multiple parties and so on — you’ll end up in disarray, with people fighting each other, political parties arguing, spending all their time on one election after the other, wasting a lot of resources.
In some ways — I think I oversimplify — but in some ways they admire Singapore. Because Singapore has a very good sense of having good governance, the principle of good governance. They have succeeded in proving something which the Chinese know cannot be done in China: to have elections but win every time. A one-party state for sixty years. The Chinese Communist Party is a little bit longer, but what a terrible job they have. Look at the instability within China during those sixty years under one party. But they admire a party that can provide good governance, stable governance, prosperous, future-oriented, with tremendous linkages with the rest of the world, the way Singapore has.
But then Deng Xiaoping said long ago: because Singapore is small, you can do that. You’re flexible, you can control certain things. China’s just too big. I can’t do it. But they are full of admiration. They have sent people here to Singapore to study for the last few decades. Generations of people have come to study how to do it. But they all recognise they can do it in a city or a city area, but you can’t do it for the whole of China.
But ultimately, that is the ideal. A one-party state that provides good governance, a government that’s caring, wise, with linkages with everybody peacefully. You threaten nobody, then nobody threatens you. At least you defend yourself against any possible threat against you, but you don’t threaten anybody. How enviable a position that is to a lot of people in China. But they know it cannot be done in China. They accept that. They have to do it their own way.
Their own way is that they must have a disciplined party. And Xi Jinping calls for it all the time. No corruption, absolutely devoted, dedicated to the principle of making the Communist Party loved and cared for, with people respecting it and believing in it and trusting it. Trusting — that’s the important thing — trusting the Communist Party to do the right thing. Whether they can achieve that or not, we don’t know. They have still to prove it. But so far, this is what they’re trying to do. And where have they got the energy to go and try to dominate the world and challenge the United States? It’d be stupid to do that. And I think they know that. They’re not doing that. They don’t want the responsibility of looking after the world. They have enough trouble within China itself.
Keith 01:11:23
If they are not destined for a clash, as someone like Huntington would put it, then the following question I had was: it seems to me, and it seems to you, that this was driven by a very deep misunderstanding of each other. What does the West misunderstand about China? And on the flip side, what does China misunderstand about the West?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:11:41
I don’t know whether I’d call it a misunderstanding. It derives from fundamental beliefs which both the Chinese and the Americans, each in their own way, are dedicated to. The American belief — this again, I think, comes from this fundamental point about every individual being equal before God and there being only one truth. And we must work towards that, and that is a universal value. And the means of achieving that universal value is to offer freedom, offer individual rights, protect their legal rights, offer democracy as a method which is bloodless, where you don’t kill each other all the time, and ultimately bring about a happy society — in the pursuit of happiness, you might say. I think that is quite fundamental to a lot of thinking.
And in their view, if that is true — and they believe it is true — it is their duty to go and tell the world to be like us. And if you’re not like us, what is wrong with you, that you refuse to see the truth? We are telling you, we’re offering it to you, we’re giving it to you free. For the last forty, fifty years, those idealists in America have been trying to help the world to become like them.
When they created the United Nations, it was not really a United Nations alone. It was an American ideal developed out of American experience, American manifest destiny, the League of Nations, and all the methods that they had tried in Europe and found the Europeans wanting. So they had to provide the leadership. The Europeans self-destructed with two world wars. The Americans then tried to create a world in which there would no longer be wars. And they set out to tell the whole world how to do it. And when people say no to them or don’t do what they do, they feel very frustrated.
I think some of them are genuine idealists. And some of them feel that they’re not prepared to give up those ideals. Maybe some Americans have given up already. But those who don’t want to give up those ideals believe it is their duty, their right, to set out to tell the world how to be a happier world with these universal values. And if you stand in the way, they just have to do something about it, even though it’s at their own expense. They’re actually, in a way, harming themselves when they do that. But they have to do it. It’s a duty.
Keith 01:14:33
You refer to Southeast Asia as a region where the mandalas of the different civilisations intersect. And in Singapore, especially in a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic society like ours, every one of us is both a descendant of a civilisation and a citizen of this country. You yourself have had to navigate that tension as well. How does one navigate this tension of cultural belonging, but also of citizenship?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:15:07
I suppose a large part of my personal life has been like that. I have had many identities. And I came to learn quite young that we all have multiple identities at the same time. You’re a son of your parents, you’re a neighbour — your identity as a good neighbour, your identity as a good son, your identity as a good citizen of a particular city, a particular place, loyal to a particular institution. In each place you have an identity. Identity with a friend, a good friend, a close friend. In our mind, our psychology has to take into account a whole range of relationships, each one of which gives you a sense of identity. Then it adds up.
So if you take multiple identities as natural, then you say, okay, there’s such a thing as a legal identity. That means I’m a citizen of a particular place, a country. But this country is a very new thing. As I said, that’s not universal. It has nothing to do with human beings or human development. It’s a development out of the political conditions of the last couple of hundred years that developed the idea of a nation state.
Up to a few decades ago, you didn’t need passports. When people migrated from one place to the other in Southeast Asia, including to Singapore, you didn’t need a passport. You didn’t need to have an identity. If you have a job, the colonial government will let you in to have the job. You’re going to work in the Dutch Indies; somebody offers you a job in the British Indies, and the job is a genuine one; the British will let you in. And you just move around. What is their identity? That imperial system was actually very free. In the meantime, as far as the government is concerned, they will record in their censuses: you’re Chinese, you’re Indian, you’re Malay, for the records. But as far as they’re concerned, you’re working in Singapore. You are equal in their eyes. You have a job, you don’t break the law, you’re fine. You break the law, you’re out. Or you go to jail.
Especially if you’re not born here, you can be exiled; you can be sent out straight away. If you’re born here, they have a legal concept of a British subject. Then you have a right to stay in Singapore. But if you’re not born here — for example, I was born in Surabaya. I come to Singapore. If I did something wrong in Singapore, I can be sent back to Surabaya. You’re Chinese, you’re sent back to China. No hesitation. The British did that to thousands of Chinese in Malaya and Singapore from the 1930s down to the 1960s, until the independence of Malaya. The British did that. It was part of the law.
Because they recognise you have multiple identities. While you’re here, you have a job, you follow the law, you’re fine. That’s your identity. You can say, I belong to Singapore, I work in Singapore — fine. If you say you are Chinese, you’re fine. If you say you’re a Buddhist, you’re fine. If you say you’re a Christian, that’s fine. Each of those identities is perfectly free. There are no borders in that sense. The colonial system did have that, because as far as the colonial government was concerned, they didn’t care who you were. You did a job. The job needed you; it’s fine. But if you break the law — that legal identity is the one thing that the colonial government can use to get rid of you, if they don’t need you, if you’re doing harm in their eyes.
So the concept of identity as having strict borders is a very recent one. And to lots of people it’s still not real. And to force it to be real seems to be unnecessary. Why should it be so necessary? Except for one reason. And that is that if you believe in this nation state — and I respect that — you have to defend it. You must be prepared to defend it. So you have to show the loyalty: the kind of national service that you do to be able to defend the country against enemies. Yes, that is the part of the legal identity which is vital to a nation state. But that’s only for national identity. Only in the name of the nation is it that the identity matters.
But apart from your national efforts and so on, your personal thing — as an artist, as a historian, as a scientist, as an engineer — in what way are you bordered? You’re not. I can read anything I want. I can learn anything I want. In fact, if I learn a lot, my country may actually appreciate me more. If I learn from other people, my country may actually appreciate me more, because I know more, I’m more useful to the country. So where are the borders?
The borders are only in one particular frame, I would say. In that frame, you have to accept it. That legal frame. People always assume that identity must be limited to the legal identity. That, I think, is probably a misunderstanding. It’s not true. Most human beings don’t live like that.
It matters when you actually need it. If Singapore was attacked, then that identity becomes vital. So you have to have a background of it. You must be prepared for that. But most of the time it has no relevance at all. In fact, you are encouraged to go and invest in so-and-so’s country because it’s good for Singapore. And bringing in foreigners to come and invest here is good for Singapore. What identity does he need? He’s got millions to invest in Singapore. He can come and live here, do whatever he likes, as long as he pays the taxes and observes the laws. His identity is of no concern. We don’t worry what passport he carries. Unless you find out he’s a front for somebody, or it’s threatening to the country. These are other matters.
So to raise identity to the point where it has to be singular is a kind of misunderstanding. I think if you start off with the idea that every human being has multiple identities, then borders are not the most important thing. It’s just one of the things you have to bear in mind, and I would say most important for legal identity. And that, I think, is probably the one that we are constantly being reminded of, because every country has to defend itself and be fairly secure and so on. But most of the time it is totally irrelevant.
Keith 01:22:58
On that note, my last question for you. Will Durant wrote in Fallen Leaves: “I feel that we of this generation give too much time to the news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news and starved of history.” Someone like you has studied history, and you’ve watched close to a century of it: empire, occupation, revolutions, the birth of new nations, and now this emerging superpower rivalry.
What are the lessons of history that you think future generations of Singaporeans, or citizens of the world, must remember?
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:23:34
I don’t think I can qualify to say that for the Singaporeans. All I can say is that every human being has a history. And he should know that everything else has a history. And if you know nothing about the history, how can you possibly understand where you stand vis-à-vis whatever it is that you face? You must know something about its history.
Because actually you do — you are curious. If you want to relate to something, you go and find out what’s behind it all. So you’re actually constantly using the past. You may not be conscious of it. Every time you fact-check something, you are actually looking at history. Is this correct? Is this fellow a Singaporean or not? Even when you check a fact like that, that’s looking at his history. What is his background before he came to Singapore? Or what is his background in Singapore? Was he a member of this political party or that political party? Or was he completely uninterested in politics? Is he writing poetry which is good for Singapore? Is he writing poetry critical of Singapore, or always admiring other countries and never admiring his own country? All these things are fact-checking. Each one is actually a historical question, all the time.
But how far back? That, I think, is what your question is about. And I would say that most of the time, far back doesn’t matter so much. It’s your recent history which obviously is the most important. But I’m very struck by the fact that there’s a very big difference between what they call the linear chronology of the West and the Chinese way of calculating dynastic history. In the West it is always assumed that the near present or the near past is more important than the distant past, because it’s linear. And it’s based on the calculation of the Christian year, dating from the date of Christ and so on. Our years are based on that. Even that is a Western thing — you might say, Mediterranean.
The Chinese don’t have that. What they have is dynastic periods. They say, in the Han Dynasty, this is what they did. In the Tang Dynasty, that’s what they did. And they know that. They learned their history. And the distance in time doesn’t matter, if the lesson is relevant to us, if what it teaches is of interest to us. I learned something from that. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Han Dynasty or Tang Dynasty or Ming Dynasty. They don’t see it as distance, more relevant or less relevant. Is that lesson comparable in any way to what we are faced with today? If it is, if I can learn from it, let’s have a look at it. Let’s look at the documents which show what they did.
If it doesn’t work today, we still do it our way, but at least we are aware that certain problems are still the same problems. They’re not that different, because human beings are not that different. We are equally good, equally bad. We’re criminals, we’re cheats, we steal, we lie. Human beings do that. And rulers deceive people. Some are good, some are bad. All of that has always been there. So we know.
And in a way the West doesn’t actually disagree with that. They just put it differently. People refer to Plato, Aristotle, and the Greeks; they refer to the famous philosophers of the past. And they don’t say that Kant is 200 years ago, so he must be less important than someone who’s a philosopher today. No, they do refer to Hegel and Marx and so on. But they have a tendency to say that the ones nearer to us are more relevant, which is fair enough, perfectly fair. But the Chinese don’t just limit themselves to that. They go further. They say, however far back it was, if the lesson is relevant and it does teach me something, I’m prepared to learn from it.
So the past is a very — what’s the word for that? I can’t quite find it — it’s very intangible. It depends on how you learnt it, how much you know of it. If you don’t know anything about the past, of course it doesn’t matter anyway. And lots of people don’t know anything about the past, so it doesn’t matter to them. I’m not advocating that everybody spends their time learning about the past, not at all. But I do say that those who learn about the past should tell people about the past. If you know about it, you should draw attention to the past where you think it’s of some relevance to the present.
Whether it is really relevant or not, only time will tell. I can’t tell. I can say something, but I don’t know whether it is relevant ten years from now, twenty years from now. But I feel that I have the right, and maybe the duty, to tell you: this is what I understand from the past, and I think it’s relevant. And if I’m wrong, well — but I shouldn’t be afraid to say so.
Keith 01:29:44
So for the young: don’t discount the distant past. Learn from it and, when relevant, try to share as much about it as you have with others.
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:29:54
I think this is something that people actually do quite naturally without even thinking. In fact, you’re probably doing it all the time, every day, somewhere along the line. But you don’t even think about it because it comes naturally. But when you want to make something very important, if you think it’s very important, you go beyond just doing it subconsciously or unconsciously. You’re consciously trying to understand it better so that you can explain it better. At least you hope to be able to do that.
And that, I think, is correct. That’s a duty. If you seriously think that something in that past has something to teach us, then I think you should seriously try to understand that and then make the effort to explain that to others. That, I think, is something you should do. But if it’s not something you want to do or are interested in, that’s fine. There are other jobs, so many more important things happening all the time. History is just one thing.
I don’t believe that everybody must learn about the past. Not at all. I’m not that dogmatic about it. All I’m saying is that my belief, my experience, has been that the more I learn about the past, it helps me. It makes me either understand things better, or makes me feel again the desire to teach people or tell people about what I understand, in the hope that it is of use to others.
Keith 01:31:25
On that note, Professor Wang, thank you so much for coming on.
Prof Wang Gungwu 01:31:27
Thank you very much for inviting me. I hope all that’s been helpful to you.
Keith 01:31:31
Yeah, it has been.
Keith 01:31:35
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