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Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu (review)

IN REVIEWING WANG GUNGWU’S 18 YEARS IN AUSTRALIA and forecasting his busy stewardship of Hong Kong University during a period of politically sensitive preparations for the transfer of power from Hong Kong’s British colonial masters to the Chinese Communist leadership, Stephen FitzGerald commented that “Wang Gungwu has not contributed a great book .... His ideas are already mapped out. Whether they [will be] brought together in one historical blockbuster remains to be seen after he has finished his stint at Hong Kong University” (p. 46). Indeed, since Wang’s subsequent departure from Hong Kong and his assumption of the directorship of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore in 1997, he has had more time and energy to review his previous intellectual output and compile into consolidated volumes a wide range of articles, chaptersin-books, seminar papers, keynote lectures and interviews. The effort required in the selection, organization, polishing, condensation, and addition of some new pieces to provide fluency and coherence in a particular volume is not to be underestimated, even if it is achieved with the assistance of a number of editors. As a result, an impressive flow of publications of Wang’s writings and lectures has appeared in recent years. There have been, for example, the five-volume series published by Times Academic Press (later reprinted by the Eastern Universities Press) from 2001 to 2002 and the two Chinese-language collections put out by Global Publishing in 2000 and 2002. This latest publication should be seen as a part of that energetic venture. Gregor Benton and Liu Hong have succeeded in putting together such a volume by Routledge Curzon partly because of Wang’s assistance in “track[ing] down elusive texts and solving some enigmas that arose along the way” and his willingness “to answer our questions and to help sort out issues of copyright and bibliographic citation” (p. ix). Producing such a work necessarily involves a fairly high degree of reprinting old as well as more recent publications (in some cases with amendments) and translation works. A large number of the 18 chapters in this book are certainly repeated publications, even though the precise proportion is difficult to ascertain given the brief editorial notations. Borrowing a phrase from the subtitle of chapter 18, “How new? Why new?,” the reader may well point out that the book is not exactly breaking new ground. However, even for scholars, originality should not be the sole criterion in their assessment of a book. By putting together a collection of works pertaining specifically to the spread of Chinese communities overseas, the book has arguably succeeded in providing