CHINESE ENTRY INTO THE GLOBAL AGE

OOI KEE BENG: Professor Wang, let's start with the idea of China as a nation state. China becoming a republic in 1911 must have been earth-shattering for many Chinese. It certainly signified the crumbling of a world view that had lasted for millennia. Within forty years of that event, a form of communism would take over instead to dictate the national paradigm.

WANG GUNGWU: To be exact, that shift was precipitated by a nationalist paradigm more than a communist paradigm. China becoming a nation state was definitely very unfamiliar to most Chinese intellectuals, requiring as it did of them to shift away from their tradition of an Imperial China and from the ideals of Confucius and other historical thinkers, in order to adapt to what was a new and revolutionary idea. In that sense, the revolution in China was not a communist one to start with, but a nationalist one.

In moving from empire to nation state, they had to go through a period wherein they turned away from the past in order to look at China afresh, and to imagine a new kind of state. And I must say that the early groups of scholars from the end of the nineteenth century down to 1949 were admirably adventurous in exploring other traditions. In other words, they took the West very seriously indeed. We tend to forget them now because they lost out after 1949, but the truth is a lot of them actually did a lot of studies on world history. They were looking particularly at Western history — why was the West so successful? They wanted an explanation, and quickly noticed how different Western history was from Chinese or East Asian history.

So what is the underlying difference? I think that when translating Plato, Aristotle, the Greeks and other European classics into Chinese, they already noticed that there was no world history as such. It was only European history writ large that they were reading, translating and reinterpreting for their Chinese audience. But they were also gaining a certain idea, a very important one in fact.