No Borders

Over the course of a long life, the author, historian and university leader Wang Gungwu has travelled between and spent periods in Asia, Europe and Australia. Born in the Dutch East Indies at the start of the 1930s, and growing up in Ipoh, British Malaya, Wang was to study at the National Central University in Nanjing, China, before the Revolution, at the University of Malaya (Singapore) and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Returning to Malaya, Wang ultimately found that serious scholarship of historical and contemporary China could only be undertaken from a greater distance, at The Australian National University, Canberra, which offered him a position as Chair of Far Eastern History. Later, Wang would serve as Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University during the lead-up to the handover of this key trading island from Britain back to China, before returning to Singapore as executive chairman of the Institute of East Asian Political Economy (IEAPE). In 'No Borders', Wang takes the reader into these disparate personal and social worlds, as well as into the imagined worlds of history and, at times, the present, that formed the focus of his enduring fascination and enquiry as a major scholar of China, Southeast Asia and international relations. To read this autobiography is to spend memorable time with a singular, urbane intellectual whose life has been lived at the intersection of competing forces of order and disorder within turbulent decades across both the East and West. A vivid historical and personal portrait is here enriched by thoughtful insight and deeply learned reflection.