I want to thank Dr Lee Lai To, His Excellency Ambassador K. Kesavapany, as well as Professor Leo Suryadinata, for organizing this amazing conference and organizing it before anybody else does so that we can steal the thunder. I was asked to make a few comments as a discussant. Some of you have come to me and said, “Oh well, let's see how you do your keynote speech at the end.” I said, “There is no keynote speech, just some concluding points. Please do not have much expectation. That way we can release you early, so that we can all go home.” I also want to apologize that I am unable to make comments on the individual papers mainly because I could only attend to one set of papers. But I tried to look through many of them.

I will comment on the three terms, “Sun Yat-sen”, “Nanyang”, and “the 1911 Republican Revolution” contained in the conference title “Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution”. Now, each one of these terms is a very important topic in itself and each of these can have a very complex relation with one another. So, I want to see how we have tried to relate them in our conference and how we can think about these issues.

The word “Nanyang” as we all know refers to the regions of the South Seas, but basically, it also refers to the Chinese in this region. There was an old migration of course, long before the late nineteenth-century plantation migration, of people who came to be called the “Peranakans” in addition to the later migrations of the late nineteenth century with which you are all familiar. But when nationalists like Hu Hanmin and others tried to organize the Nanyang Chinese for the revolutionary cause in the early 1900s, they were very frustrated. They would say that the Nanyang Chinese did not know their Chinese names; they did not know the language; they did not even know they were Chinese.