Prof Wang Gungwu – A Historian Without Equal – on China

 

Prof Wang’s scholarship is world renowned, but I have only been seriously following his writings, lectures, talks and interviews after I got involved in a thought leadership orgnisation in 2016. (I had the opportunity to be introduced to him earlier, but that was more on a social basis; he was a VVIP in a function and I, a minor guest.)

His philosophical depth in defining terms which we often use in the most casual manner has a deep impact on the way I think about things now. For example, we were quite happy to be called huá qiáo (华侨, overseas Chinese) when we should be identifying ourselves as huá yì (华裔, ethnic Chinese). Some may argue, “What’s the big deal?” I think there is, but maybe I should leave it to another day to explain the fundamental difference. I also watched another recent interview of him; apparently, he is now working to define wén mínɡ (文明, loosely, civilization) and wén huà (文化, loosely, culture) more definitively. Ditto on “Nation” and “Country”.

When someone alerted me that he would be giving an on-line lecture at HELP University on 10 August, I lost no time in signing up for a seat at the university’s Damansara auditorium. Several distinguished historians were there to hear from him on “China – From Middle Kingdom to World Power: WHAT OF THE FUTURE?” Some were Prof Wang’s students when he was with the University of Malaya. I was happy to see my friends Dr Stephen Leong Mun Yoon and Tan Sin Su there. Dr Leong is a historian in his own right and he and Prof Wang were teaching at the university in those early days.

Well before the US-China tensions, Prof Wang in a lecture he gave at the National University of Singapore in 2016 was already talking about the South China Sea’s vulnerability as the big powers’ pond. But no one could imagine how the relationship between these two countries has soured so much since then. In his 10 August lecture, he spoke for more than an hour, seemingly without notes, on the events leading to China’s rise as a world power in the modern time. (Prof Wang will be turning 94 in October; he is so incredibly robust and sharp!)

To him, the watershed year in the US-China relationship was 2008, when the world suffered a financial crisis. It was China that bailed out America. And this awoken the US. How can a protégé become stronger than the master? Everyone knew China was for decades in a pathetic mess before Nixon visited China. Prof Wang also touched on the term world power, a notion which had not existed until the West began to colonize the world. Even the US was not one until after the end of World War II. And now China is being seen as one.

It is now the US’s obsession to contain China, and because of its constant muscle-flexing in front of China’s doorsteps – in the name of upholding free navigation and protecting its vassals and allies in the region – it has also created an obsession on China’s part to build its naval might. (And militarily, China needs the depths of that sea to operate its submarine fleet.) The region is now gripped by two opposing obsessions!

However, Prof Wang was a little ambivalent on the legitimacy of China over its disputes with the other claimants in the region. He argues that maritime boundaries are almost impossible to determine. China’s claim is entirely borne out of historical records – from the Ming and the Qing – but the entire sea was virtually under the Japanese until after the conclusion of World War II upon which the sovereignty of the islands in the South China Sea was supposed to revert to China, which was under the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China then. In 1949, the Kuomintang government fled to Taiwan and the People Republic of China (PRC) now says it is the rightful owner of these islands. Prof Wang has been quite consistent on this stance over the years. I do understand his position; he understood international laws quite differently from the customary ones held by us Chinese. I suppose that might be the reason he has not been well acknowledged by China all these years, despite his scholarship and academic standing.

In fielding a question, Prof Wang said that the Nine-Dash Line, as appeared in maps published by the Kuomintang government and PRC, had historically never been objected, contested, or challenged by any party until more recently. He explained that this is probably because China was no threat to any power when the map was first drawn, and [in the 1950s and 1960s] PRC was not a member of UN, hence no one paid any attention or importance of this line at that time. Since no one contested, these maps formed the legal basis of China’s assertion on the legality of this line. However, he also said there are also historical records to support such assertions. (Sin Su helped me to recall this part.)

In a recent interview with SCMP, Dr Wu Shicun (吴士存), the founder of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies in China said that the XiSha Islands (西沙群岛, Paracel Islands) had long been mapped out during the Ming dynasty and were Chinese possessions. However, in the wake of Imperial Japan’s seizure of northeast China, France in 1931 took control of nine islands and reefs, including ZhongYe Dao (中业岛, Thitu Island) in the South China Sea. All these are in the NanSha Islands cluster (南沙群島, Spratly Islands), though. When China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, the Philippines under the then Marcos Senior, sent his military to take over a number of islands in Nansha including FeiXin Dao (費信島, Flat Island) and ZhongYe Dao. This was in the 1970s. As both Beijing and Taipei did not respond militarily, the Philippines conducted five more military operations and took over eight more Chinese and reefs. RenAi Jiao (仁爱礁Second Thomas Shoal was not amongst them, though. However, I must say even though Dr Wu says these NanSha islands and reefs were originally China’s, he did not quite substantiate his assertion with more solid evidence. He did say that Beijing has never claimed that the whole of the South China Sea belongs to China, nonetheless, he contends that these islands and reefs should all be returned to the Chinese people.

In the absence of any legitimate record, I actually found it difficult to support positions taken by people like Dr Wu, even though it was obvious that the only country which had an intimate knowledge of the South China Sea was certainly China. However, I did find it difficult to support the Philippines’s claim either. The Filipino’s concept of nationhood did not arise until the late 1800s and seas beyond the main islands were rainbows to them. However, recently a friend forwarded me a CGTN article which carried an opinion of Anthony Carty (profile below) who had gone through British and French archives, spanning from the 1880s to the late 1970s, to look at the historical understanding of sovereignty of NanSha Islands. He discovered that “the archives demonstrate, taken as a whole, that it is the view of the British and French legal experts that as a matter of international law territory the XiSha Islands and the NanSha Islands are Chinese territory.”

On NanSha, he says “French legal advice was that France never completed an effective occupation of the Spratlys, and they abandoned them completely in 1956. In the 1930s, they recognised that these Spratlys had always been home to Chinese fishermen from Hainan and Guangdong. There had never been any Vietnamese or Philippine connection and French interference had only been in its own name and not that of Vietnam. It is the British who then drew a decisive conclusion, from all the French and British records available, that the Chinese were the owners of the Spratlys, a legal position certified as part of British Cabinet records in 1974.

Interestingly, he also discovered a record in the US National Archives, circa mid-1950s, in which the under-secretary of state says that the Filipinos have no claim to the Spratlys and it is the US interest to encourage them to make a claim anyway to keep Communist China out of the area.

Be that as it may, an arbitral tribunal in 2016 ruled in favour of the Philippines on most of its submissions. However, it clarified that while it would not "rule on any question of sovereignty ... and would not delimit any maritime boundary", China's historic rights claims over maritime areas (as opposed to land masses and territorial waters) within the "nine-dash line" have no lawful effect unless entitled to under UNCLOS. China, which did not participate, has rejected the ruling, as has Taiwan. The United Nations does not hold any position on the case or on the disputed claims. And I understand the ruling is not legally binding.

There may be too much water under the bridge already. And China might be fighting an uphill battle. The South China Sea is full of players now. The map below shows how it has been divided based on oil and gas interests, though there are overlapping claims in many parts. It is might that matters now. No matter how strong China’s legal position is in XiSha and NanSha, it will have to contend with the Vietnamese in the former and the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei or even Indonesia in the latter.

It is likely that Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia are likely to be able to come to terms with China on the pond’s resources, I do not see that this route will be possible with the Philippines, as long as Marcos Junior is helming the country.

But as far as China is concerned, its military and naval control (not ownership) over the pond is non-negotiable, for it means life or death for China. The possession of RenAi Jiao and HuangYan Dao (黄岩岛, the Scarborough Shoal) is absolutely important to China – as long as America and its hoodlums seek to use the Philippines to contain China. Maybe China should say this louder and clearer to the world. (Prof Wang was posed this question by a member of the audience: Isn’t this hard stance of China destroying the very image it wants to project to the world? I cannot quite recall Prof Wang’s reply, but I believe he took pain to talk about role of soft power in geopolitics.  

Anthony Carty (born 1947; PhD Cambridge), is a legal scholar at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a law professor at Tsinghua University and the University of Hong Kong (Sir YK Pao Chair of Public Law), after a career in Britain.

Postscript:

I also love to show off the following picture to friends. Two great historians – Prof Wang and Dr Leong – holding the two books which have been self-published by me. The contents of the two books must be of elementary stuff to them!