Do you share the view that the United States is the offshore balancer that helps to keep the peace between China and Japan?

That's taking a narrow, Southeast Asian point of view. The United States is a superpower. By definition, a superpower takes on responsibility for the whole world and is active or is prepared to be active everywhere. At least, by definition, a superpower is expected to take on certain responsibilities. American internationalists believe that their country's wealth and power compel the United States to do some good. This is an idealistic and liberal interpretation of a blessing. It is a burden as well, but one that has to be shouldered. The United States is responsible for helping keep international peace and ensuring its own security. The two are not contradictory because the security of the United States depends on its capacity to act as a superpower successfully. So that is why when it is challenged, and has not been so successful in some places, it's a real anguish for it to know what it should do. Does it continue to carry on a responsibility when it knows it is unable to do it without a lot of help? Should it resist the “America first” idea, which is the narrow-minded, realist view that America should look after its own interests and ensure only that nobody can threaten it? That debate is going on in the United States.

So when you say that America is an offshore balancer, that's speaking from a Southeast Asian or smallcountries’ point of view. It is not how Americans would see themselves. It's a very small part of “the city on the hill” idea, the inheritance of a manifest destiny. The United States can be expected to be helpful wherever it is needed and where it is wanted. If that is how those small countries out there want the United States to participate in their security against big powers in the neighbourhood, like China or Japan or India, the Americans can be expected to do their best. But this point of view has its limits. It would be a mistake to call it an offshore balancer.

How did you respond to Singapore's Merger with Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak to form Malaysia?

On my return from China, I went to the University of Malaya in 1949, went on to study at the University of London, and came back to teach at the University of Malaya. I returned from London in 1957, the year the Federation of Malaya became independent. I saw that as a great beginning and decided to identify with the Federation. Of course, Singapore was out of it because it was still a British colony. The University of Malaya was actually in Singapore. But because Malaya was independent, the Malayan government, quite reasonably, said that the University of Malaya should really be in Kuala Lumpur and not in Singapore. There were big discussions about that and then they came to a compromise, which was that there would still be one University of Malaya with a division in Singapore and a division in Kuala Lumpur. In 1959, people were asked to decide which division they wanted to work in. For me, it was very obvious: I came from Malaya and so I asked to go to Kuala Lumpur. That was a clear indication that my real identity lay in the new country that was being established. And the idea of building a new university for that country to help to shape that nation was something very attractive to me. I certainly believed that that was something that I wanted to do. So I offered to go to KL.

The question of Singapore's future was left vague. Only in 1960–61 did this idea of Merger come up, with the Prime Minister of Malaya agreeing to the British proposal, but with great reservations, because the Malay leadership in Kuala Lumpur was always concerned about adding so many Chinese from Singapore to the population and changing the demographic pattern too much. So the new plan brought in Sabah and Sarawak. Of course, we were aware that demography was the real reason for the creation of Malaysia. Singapore, too, was aware of this.

You were Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1995, crucial years leading up to the British colony's return to China. Did you accept the offer to be Vice-Chancellor partly because you wanted to have a ringside view of history?

Well, I don't think I thought in terms of having a ringside view. Indeed, I never expected to be a Vice-Chancellor. I never aspired to the job, but when the invitation came, I had to think about why I would want to go. I was not particularly attracted to the idea of being a Vice-Chancellor but I was attracted to the idea of being in Hong Kong while something so important was taking place. Coming from a former British colony, I was naturally conscious of the fact that this was the last major colony of the British but, at the same time, I was also aware that this was a very different kind of colony.

Indeed, it was customary before 1997 to refer to Hong Kong as a “territory” instead of a “colony”.

Hong Kong has never been accepted as a colony by the Chinese government. The Chinese always regarded Hong Kong as a territory that was taken from them by force. At least since the revolutionary government and even before that, I think, they never thought of it as something permanent. And the idea that Hong Kong should be permanently separated from China was not acceptable to Chinese leaders. They had lost Hong Kong in war and they would like to get it back one day. Thus, how they would get it back, how the British would decolonize in this particular case, was of considerable interest to me.

The British knew, of course, that the Chinese never regarded Hong Kong as a colony. One of the reasons why the Chinese did not want Hong Kong to be considered a colony was that the decolonization committee of the United Nations took it for granted that decolonization meant the eventual independence of that colony.

When, where and how did you meet Professor Wang?

We met in 1951 at the University of Malaya. In those days, the university was at the Bukit Timah campus. He was only a year ahead of me because, when he came back from China, his one and a half years there were not recognized. He had to start as a freshman all over again. So although he is three years older than me, we were only one year apart in the university.

How do you remember your first meeting?

We were both on the Students’ Council. He was the president of the Students’ Union and I was one of the council members. He asked me out to the pictures after one of the meetings. I remember it very clearly: it was Macbeth with Orson Welles as Macbeth.

So, he made the first approach.

Oh yes. But I must confess that I didn't run very fast when he started to chase me!

How did the relationship develop after that?

Well, I suppose you could say that we became boyfriend and girlfriend. We didn't have very much money so we did simple things like going for walks, seeing some good films and eating at roadside stalls. We found that we enjoyed the same sort of films, books and music. We got to know each other quite well during those years of courtship.

Then what happened?

What happened was that he decided to study history. For an academic career, he needed to get a higher degree like a Ph.D. So if he went to England, what would happen to us? We decided we'd get engaged. He would go to England and I would stay behind for a year, work and save some money because I felt that my mother, who was the sole supporter of my family, should not be burdened any more by a daughter who didn't earn any money. So I went to work; I found a job at St. Andrew's Boys’ School. It was looking for an English teacher for the sixth form. I went to be interviewed and was hired on the spot. I never intended to be a teacher. I became one nevertheless when I realized I enjoyed teaching very much.

These interviews with Professor Wang Gungwu seek to convey to a general audience something of the life, times and thoughts of a leading historian, Southeast Asianist, Sinologist and public intellectual. The book felicitates him on his 80th birthday.

Wang Gungwu was born on 9 October 1930 in Surabaya to Wang Fo Wen and Ting Yien. His father came from Taizhou to teach Chinese in Surabaya. In the course of the senior Wang's career, the family moved to Malaya, and the junior Wang grew up in culturally-rich Ipoh, where he attended the English-medium Anderson School. The brutality unleashed on the Chinese during the Japanese Occupation turned his world upside down. At the end of World War II, he joined the National Central University in Nanjing, where he studied foreign languages. A different kind of upheaval — the Civil War — disrupted his studies this time. At the end of 1948, he returned to Malaya at the start of the 12-year-long Emergency which called into question the future of Malaya itself. As an undergraduate at the University of Malaya, which he joined in 1949, he read English literature, history and economics. He graduated with Honours in 1953 and obtained his Master's degree in history two years later. Among his many extracurricular achievements was his role as the founder-president of the university's Socialist Club. He received his doctorate in Chinese History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1957, the same year that Malaya gained independence. His doctorate was on the Five Dynasties, but his scholarly horizons then broadened to embrace contemporary China and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaya.

After his return from London, his teaching career took him from the University of Malaya, where he taught at both the Singapore and Kuala Lumpur campuses and rose to be Professor of History; to the Australian National University where, from 1968 to 1986, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Far Eastern History and Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies.

Your father came from Taizhou to teach Chinese in Malaya. What drew him here?

My parents came from well-established families in China that had been impoverished over a generation or two. Most Chinese had been impoverished by changing political conditions, the changeover of systems of government, the civil war, the complete collapse of the economy basically from the changes that took place when an agrarian economy found itself threatened by capitalist forces. That was so in the rest of Asia as well. With the rise of the new capitalism, of new manufacturing industries arising from the Industrial Revolution of the West, many of the local industries were killed off. And certainly in rural China, what was happening from the middle of the 19th century was the steady impoverishment of people who were producing things that they couldn't sell any more. Or, they would sell them for such a low price that they couldn't survive. However, the Chinese themselves were trying to catch up, building their own industries and so on, manufacturing cheap things, and this of course had an impact on rural industry. So that period of adaptation was, I think, perilous for families everywhere in Asia.

In that sense, my parents were not exceptional. My father actually was relatively fortunate. He had a good education at home because he came from an educated family. He got to a teachers’ college that merged with the university so he was both in education and had a university education. So he had a degree — but the degree wasn't worth much. In those days, you graduated and there weren't any jobs; it's becoming like that again. The family wasn't able to help him and, so, the moment he graduated, he looked for a job. That meant a school-teaching job in those days unless you were exceptionally fortunate and received a scholarship to go to the United States. So he started out as a teacher in China and was then offered a job to come out to Southeast Asia and teach at a better salary. It was a good cause as well. The cause was to educate the overseas Chinese. It was a cause that the government actually officially endorsed. It encouraged young people to go out and teach abroad.