Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2013. xi,159 pp. US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 978-962-996-536-5 .
This thoughtful and accessible book by one of the most prominent senior scholars in the history of China and its relations with the rest of the world will be of interest both to academics specializing in the history of Chinese nationalism and to many ordinary readers who want to understand more of China’s history and culture. It will also be a welcome addition to reading material for undergraduates since it combines a pleasant prose style with a deeply scholarly approach to the subject. However, readers should be aware that, despite the title, this is primarily a book about the history of Chinese nationalism and identity, rather than about the new global history.
The book is made up of lectures given on various occasions and a previously published essay. In each chapter Wang Gungwu reflects on a different theme in the history of modern China’s changing ideas of the nation by analyzing a particular term or idea. The first chapter considers the vexed issue of how to write global history. Wang focuses on the question of how Chinese writers can understand their own history in its global context given that global history as a genre remains centred on the rise of the West, while Chinese history has long placed China at the centre of the story.
The ideas of empire, sovereignty, and revolution form the subject of the three subsequent chapters. In each case Wang meditates on the changing relations between the English term and its Chinese equivalents. One of the nicest features of the book is the depth that this gives as we learn the classical origins of the terms and how their meanings in the twentieth century and today have continued to hold elements of those roots despite becoming the apparent equivalent of English terms. Using this methodology Wang argues that “empire” and “imperialism” are not very helpful terms to apply to China. The Qing were not the rulers of an empire that was equivalent to the Dutch in the East Indies, and both the Qing and the Dutch were very different from the earlier Malay networks of the Southeast Asian archipelago. This comparison with the history of Southeast Asia is no doubt a natural one to a Singapore-based scholar, but it is one of the book’s most attractive features, making a refreshing change to the general tendency of Chinese, American and European authors to deal with the Qing strictly in comparison to the nation-states of Western Europe. It also draws our attention to the wide range of potential meaning in a term such as “empire” and the political implications of different uses through time. The next essay argues that sovereignty, as a Western European legally-based understanding of political legitimacy, has been alien to the Chinese tradition, even though the twentieth-century Chinese state adopted the idea of sovereignty and has used it effectively in international negotiations. Nevertheless Wang argues that the Chinese state has long been more comfortable with more flexible ideas of legitimacy in their relations with foreign states, whether that took the form of the tributary states in the Ming and Qing or the Soviet idea of a family of socialist states in the 1950s and 1960s. The final essay looks at the idea of revolution and its relation to the traditional concept of geming by asking the provocative question: Why are the changes that have taken place in China since 1979 never described as a revolution? This leads into a discussion of how geming was connected with ideas of violent dynastic overthrow, which makes it very different to the Western conception of an industrial or social revolution.
The book ends with a pair of alternative concluding chapters. The first looks at efforts to create a modern Chinese civilization, mainly since the 1980s, and gives some of Wang’s own ideas for necessary changes, such as the eradication of Han chauvinism in government policies and efforts to avoid discrimination against the religious practices of minority peoples. The second and more interesting concluding chapter is curiously labelled an appendix. In it Wang returns to his longstanding interests in the overseas Chinese to look at how ethnic Chinese outside China have related to the idea of China as a universal Confucian value system (tianxia) or as a modern nation-state. By telling the stories of Ku Hung-ming and Lim Boon Keng, Wang argues that ideas of tianxia were hopelessly outdated and irrelevant by the middle of the twentieth century. He then contrasts Ku and Lim’s political failure with the success of Liao Zhongkai and Eugene Chen, who were loyal to China as a nation state, and Tan Cheng Lok, a prominent Chinese community leader loyal to Malaya as a nation state. He suggests that the concept of tianxia gave a space for forms of identity (pre-nationalism or trans-nationalism) that was eradicated in the world of the nation states. Thus the book ends with the somewhat wistful concession that the modern nation-state can be as problematic a unit for its inhabitants as an empire.
The book’s weakness lies exactly in its greatest strengths: this is a work at a high degree of generalization. It is intellectual history dedicated to great men, great thinkers and widely shared ideas. Wang also consciously and explicitly adopts the “point of view of an ethnic Chinese” (x) in his writing. As a result, to a Western reader the book may seem at times disconcertingly supportive of Chinese state nationalism, for example in its treatment of the Tibet and Taiwan issues. Nevertheless Wang Gungwu is one of the world’s leading scholars in the field; the book is clearly the product of a lifetime of thinking. It is well worth reading.
Henrietta Harrison
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
pp. 565-567