REVIEW INTERVIEW WITH WANG GUNGWU

June 10, 2009 ST
REVIEW INTERVIEW WITH WANG GUNGWU
The accidental - but masterly - historian
By Goh Sui Noi, Senior Writer


IN A way, Professor Wang Gungwu is an accidental historian.
His first love was literature. He would have picked literature for his honours course at the University of Malaya in Singapore except that the professor of English whom he admired had returned to England. He was left to choose between economics and history, the other two subjects he had studied. Economics, with its abstract models, he found too theoretical. 'I was more interested in unique things and things that actually happened,' he explained. So he chose history.

Even so, he could have gone on to pursue his interest in creative writing. 'In the end, I had to decide whether I was good enough to be a creative writer.'

He decided that he did not have the talent or will to write great novels or poetry and so chose to be a scholar instead.

'The scholarly life was something that appealed to me,' he said. He liked that teaching at a university meant taking part in the task of discovering new knowledge, of having better interpretations or devising new approaches.

Literature's loss is history's gain. Prof Wang went on to become a fine historian of China and the Chinese, penning many riveting books of history. He will be honoured on Friday for his work when he will be conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Cambridge University. He will be joined by nine others, including 1998 economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates.

This is not the first accolade that Prof Wang has received for his work, but it holds special meaning for him. For one thing, he is not an alumnus of Cambridge. He has not worked in Britain, whereas he has done so in Australia, where he has received honorary degrees from several universities. Chinese and Hong Kong universities have also awarded him honorary professorships and degrees respectively.

The latest award 'is special because it suggests that Cambridge University, which is a very good university, feels (Chinese history) is an important field and that my work is worth honouring or rewarding in some way', he said.

Prof Wang's work reflects his abiding interest in understanding the human condition, believing as he does that one can attain a deeper understanding of the present by knowing the past. As is the case with all great historians, what motivates Prof Wang's interest in the past is not the past as such but the present.

He was first drawn to study China's history because he had spent a year in Nanjing in 1947-48 at the National Central University. He saw a regime that had just won a victory against the Japanese and was in possession of huge resources decline rapidly and lose a civil war within three years. He wanted to understand why great civilisations could collapse.

He started by studying the reformist Kang Youwei and the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, but found it impossible to do so given the atmosphere of the time. After the communist takeover in China, and with colonial Singapore combating its own leftists, anything to do with contemporary China was considered politically suspect. Books published in China were banned and that limited his research material.

He turned to ancient Chinese history instead, first researching the early trade between China and South-east Asia for his masters and then the period of chaos between the Tang and Sung dynasties - much like the period after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 - for his doctorate.

On his return from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies where he did his PhD, he taught at his alma mater in Singapore for two years before moving to its new branch in Kuala Lumpur in 1959. He taught the history of the Ming dynasty but was also asked to talk about the Chinese in South-east Asia. So he was simultaneously researching Chinese involvement in South-east Asia during the Ming dynasty as well as contemporary overseas Chinese. He was imperceptibly moving away from the ancient history of China into contemporary history - the history of the present, as it were.

Just as he was feeling then the limitation of doing research in Malaysia, he was invited by Australian National University to be a research professor there. The Cultural Revolution had just begun in China and he was appalled by the destruction of books and artefacts and wanted to understand why it was happening. The impetus to do so came during a month of travel in South Korea in 1968 where he saw how well Chinese traditions had been preserved there. He left that year for Australia where the abundance of research material and the freedom to study what he wanted was a refreshing change.

'I was able to catch up and understand, and it was there after a few years that I started to write about contemporary China,' he said.

In 1985, he was offered the vice-chancellorship of the University of Hong Kong. He could not resist the opportunity this afforded to observe at close quarters the tremendous changes taking place in China.

Prof Wang was born in Surabaya in Indonesia, grew up in Ipoh in Malaya and studied in Singapore - to which he returned in 1995. Former deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee had invited him to head the Institute of East Asian Political Economy, now known as the East Asian Institute.

When the institute moved in 2007 to the Bukit Timah campus, where the University of Malaya was once located, Prof Wang's academic life had come full circle. He stepped down as director of the institute that year but remains its chairman. At 78, he spends his time lecturing overseas and here, co-supervising graduate students and continuing with his study of Chinese history. He is currently looking at China's transformation from empire into a nation-state and the obstacles it faced in the transformation. Prof Wang is one of the contributors to the Think-Tank column in these pages.

Though he has not gone back to studying ancient history, it continues to fascinate him. 'I wish I had more lives to learn about all that, it is too much to learn.' The accidental historian has become the consummate historian.

suinoi@sph.com.sg

Britons angered by France's D-Day 'slight' - 6 Jun 2009

Britons angered by France's D-Day 'slight'
Tiff over the Queen's omission from memorial event reopens debate on Britain's WWII role

A US jeep driving by Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer beach, Normandy, western France on Thursday, during preparations for the D-Day celebrations to mark the 65th anniversary of the Allied landings in Nazi-occupied France. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

LONDON: A diplomatic tiff over Queen Elizabeth II's omission from the guest list for this week's D-Day commemorations has reopened a divide over who should share credit for the World War II defeat of Nazi Germany.
Britons are grumbling that their nation does not get its due - either from its wartime ally, the United States, or from the French whom it helped to liberate.

Today, US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are due to stand side by side in Normandy to remember the Allied landings 65 years ago, when more than 150,000 troops swam, waded and parachuted onto Nazi-occupied French soil, turning the tide of the war.

The Queen - Britain's head of state, the supreme commander of its armed forces and a veteran of the wartime women's Auxiliary Territorial Service - will not be there. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was invited to represent the country instead.

'Sarkozy hijacks Longest Day,' said The Times of London, which ran a slew of letters from outraged Britons. The Daily Mail said the Queen had been 'betrayed' by the 'sorry shambles' over the event.

After days of diplomatic dallying, Buckingham Palace said on Tuesday that Mr Sarkozy had sent an invitation to the Queen's son and heir, Prince Charles, who will now be attending.

The royal compromise helped soothe ruffled British feathers, but military historian Peter Caddick- Adams of Britain's Cranfield University said the spat 'says a lot about Britain and France'.

'There is a concern in Britain that France is keen to diminish the role of the British,' he said.

At the same time, there is 'concern in French minds about their liberation at the hands of their Anglo-Saxon rivals'.

The French insisted no slight was meant, and said today's ceremony is intended primarily as a US-French event, rather than a full-blown commemoration of the Allied effort like those held on the 50th and 60th anniversaries of D-Day.

But that has left Britons feeling slighted. More than 60,000 British personnel landed on June 6, 1944, alongside 73,000 Americans, more than 20,000 Canadians and a small number of Free French commandos.

The total includes more than 130,000 soldiers who came ashore at five Normandy beaches and 23,000 airborne troop members. Many of the ships and planes that supported the landing force were British too.

Fatality estimates for the Allied forces vary, but range from 2,500 to more than 5,000 dead on D-Day.

Ms Agnes Poirier, a London-based French political commentator, said the attempt to recast D-Day commemorations as a Franco-American affair 'is not only the rewriting of history, it's lunacy'.

'Many French people are really embarrassed about this,' she added.

Britain, France and the US have always seen the war rather differently. In The Guardian newspaper, humorist Simon Hoggart summed up the British view - with tongue only slightly in cheek - as: 'The Americans took their own good time to join us but when they did, between us we rescued the useless French. And are they grateful? Don't be silly.'

Meanwhile, many historians think that arguments over whether Britain or the US played the greater part in winning the war miss the point, saying instead that it was the Soviet Union which played the decisive role.

'The British and the Americans killed only one in five Germans that were killed on the battlefield,' says Mr Andrew Roberts, author of the World War II history book, The Storm Of War.

'Four out of every five German deaths took place on the Eastern Front. Us arguing among ourselves over the glories of D-Day is squabbling over the scraps.'

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Merkel bows to Nazi victims

Merkel bows to Nazi victims

BUCHENWALD (Germany) - GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday she 'bows before all the victims' of the Nazis, during a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany with US President Barack Obama.
'Incomprehension, horror: there is no word to describe the terrible things that happened to so many people in this camp and in other concentration and death camps,' Ms Merkel said. 'I bow before all the victims.'

Ms Merkel toured the camp in Germany where 56,000 people perished in the Nazi era with Mr Obama and former inmates Bertrand Herz and Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate, all four laying white roses at a memorial.

The visit forms part of a history-laden trip over two days to Europe by Mr Obama also taking in Dresden, flattened by Allied bombing in 1945, and ceremonies in France on Saturday for the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

'How could such a thing happen,' Ms Merkel said. 'We Germans are determined to ensure that nothing like this is ever reproduced.' -- AFP

Last Titanic survivor dies in England 2009

Last Titanic survivor dies in England
AFP - Monday, June 1LONDON (AFP) - - Millvina Dean, the last remaining survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died in a care home in England, media reports said. She was 97.

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Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known to friends as Millvina, was only nine weeks old when the liner hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank killing 1,500 people.

She survived after being bundled up in a sack and carried to safety. Her mother Georgette Eva and brother Bertram also made it, but her father, Bertram Frank, was among those who died.

Dean died in a private nursing home near Ashurst in the southern English county of Hampshire, according to the BBC and Britain's domestic Press Association news agency. Staff there refused to comment late Sunday.

Dean's family had boarded the Titanic at Southampton, heading for a new life in Kansas where her father hoped to open a tobacconist shop.

Born on February 12, 1912, Dean was the youngest passenger on board. At the time, RMS Titanic was the most luxurious, most technically advanced and largest passenger liner in the world.

She was dubbed "unsinkable", but it took just two hours and 40 minutes for her to disappear into the icy waters of the Atlantic after striking an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14.

Dean was taken back to Southampton with her family after the disaster and did not find out that she had been on board until she was eight years old and her mother was planning to remarry.

According to enthusiasts' website Encyclopedia Titanica (ET), Dean worked for the government as a cartographer during World War II and then for an engineering company.

She told reporters that it was not until the wreckage of the liner was found in 1985 that she suddenly became a celebrity, taking part in documentaries and giving media interviews.

Dean was invited to complete her family's ill-fated journey to the United States in 1997 aboard the QE2, and accepted, although she turned down an offer to attend the premier of the movie "Titanic" because it would be too upsetting.

She moved into a private nursing home in Hampshire after breaking her hip three years ago, and after struggling to pay the bills was forced to sell off some of her memorabilia.

At auction in October 2008 she raised 31,150 pounds (40,000 euros, 53,900 dollars), selling off rare prints of the liner signed by the artists as well as compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund.

Dean was also forced to sell a 100-year-old suitcase filled with clothes donated to her family by the people of New York when they arrived after being rescued.

In the wake of the auction, friends including members of the British Titanic Society and the Belfast Titanic Society -- the liner was built in Belfast in Northern Ireland-- set up a campaign to secure her future.

Among the donors to the Millvina Fund were Hollywood actors Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in the 1997 "Titanic" film. The pair and the film's director, James Cameron, reportedly donated 30,000 US dollars in total.

The last remaining US survivor, Lillian Asplund, died in her home in May 2006 at the age of 99. She was just five years old when the Titanic went down.

KRouge prison chief asks victims for forgiveness

AFP - Tuesday, March 31

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - - Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch admitted responsibility for his crimes at his UN-backed trial and asked the families of the regime's victims for forgiveness.

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"May I be permitted to apologise to the survivors of the regime and also the loved ones of those who died brutally during the regime. I ask not that you forgive me now, but hope you will later," Duch told the court.

"As a member of the (Khmer Rouge) I recognise responsibilty for what happened at Tuol Sleng," he said, speaking in Khmer language.

Prosecutors Tuesday gave harrowing details of the torture and execution of thousands of Cambodians as they laid their case against the Khmer Rouge regime's prison chief for the first time.

Inmates at the notorious jail run by Duch had their nails pulled out and electrodes attached to their genitals, while some were subjected to live autopsies or had the blood drained from them until they died, prosecutors said.

Only a handful of people are known to have survived Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a genocide museum lined with photographs of some of the more than 15,000 men, women and children who died there in the 1970s.

Prosecutors at Cambodia's long-delayed UN-backed tribunal said Kaing Guek Eav -- a former maths teacher also known as Duch -- played a central role as chief of the security apparatus for the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime.

"For 30 years, a whole generation of Cambodians have been struggling to get answers about their families' fates," Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang told the court, as Duch jotted notes in the dock.

"Today in this courtroom before the Cambodian people and the world, at long last this process begins and justice will be done."

During a brief recess, Tuol Sleng survivor Bou Meng told reporters video footage shown by prosecutors, which included a corpse chained to a bed, reminded him of how he lost his wife at the prison.

"I cannot forgive Duch because of my wife's life. I want to beat him to death, but I respect the law and now is the time to use it," said Bou Meng, who was spared because his skills as an artist were deemed useful to the regime.

International co-prosecutor Robert Petit said that people detained at Tuol Sleng, also known as S21, had been tortured "under the accused's direct orders and sometimes by his own hand."

"The policy was that no one could leave S21 alive," Petit told the court.

"Victims were beaten with rattan sticks and whips, electrocuted, had toenails and finger nails pulled out, were suffocated with plastic bags forcibly tied over their heads and were stripped naked and had their genitals electrocuted," Petit said.

"The accused has stated that beatings by a stick was used the most because other forms of torture took too much time."

Duch, 66, has denied personally torturing or executing prisoners but has taken responsibility for presiding over the prison in Phnom Penh. He is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and premeditated murder.

Duch, who faces life in jail, said he acted under orders from superiors in the Khmer Rouge, which rose to power as a spinoff from the conflict in Vietnam and emptied Cambodia's cities to take society back to a rural "Year Zero."

Up to two million people died during its nearly four years in power.

But Chea Leang contended that Duch himself played a central role, running the central prison and a nationwide network of 195 security centres, which systematically starved, tortured and executed hundreds of thousands of people.

"S21 formed an integral and indeed vital role in a widespread attack on the population of Cambodia. The accused's crimes were part of this attack," she added.

"Prisoners would be tortured until they confessed to being enemies, implicating their friends, colleagues, and neighbours, creating a new list of traitors to be arrested, tortured and smashed," she said.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died under house arrest in 1998, and many in Cambodia believe the UN-sponsored tribunal is the last chance to bring those regime figures still alive to justice.

Duch himself is expected to address the court about his role and publicly ask forgiveness from Cambodians. He became a born-again Christian during the 1990s and was arrested in 1999 after years in hiding.

The tribunal was formed in 2006 after nearly a decade of wrangling between the United Nations and Cambodian government, and has faced controversy over allegations of corruption and political interference.

The government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge fighter, has been accused of trying to protect the regime's former figures from facing justice.

Female vampire

ROME – An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire. The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.

"Vampires don't exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did," said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire."

Medieval texts show the belief in vampires was fueled by the disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone.

During epidemics, mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.

"These characteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies," Borrini said. "But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: 'This guy is alive, he's drinking blood and eating his shroud.'"

Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.

At the time however, what passed for scientific texts taught that "shroud-eaters" were vampires who fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague in order to increase their ranks.

To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by later literature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire's mouth so that it would starve to death, Borrini said.

That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she died of the plague during the epidemic that also claimed the life of the painter Titian.

Much later, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.

Such a reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to the superstitions about "shroud-eaters," said Piero Mannucci, the vice president of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.

"Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said.

The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini's research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.

Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and in countless Hollywood revisitations.

"The real vampire of tradition was different," he said. "It was just a decomposing body."

Da Vinci decoded

Da Vinci decoded - 2 March 2009

A drawing obscured by handwriting for five centuries in one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks may be a youthful self-portrait of the genius, according to Italian experts who 'aged' the sketch to compare it with confirmed later self-portraits.
A detail of the page of da Vinci's Codex Of The Flight Of Birds and a sketch made by Italian state TV channel RAI's graphic department are seen in this picture released on Saturday. Hidden under layers of thick writing, the sketch was spotted by Italian scientific journalist Piero Angela.

PHOTO: REUTERS, RAITRE