Another contested word is our title is 'Chinese', which we somehow use to include some purely English-speaking
Australian, purely Indonesian-speaking Indonesians, purely Thai-speaking Thais, and a range of multilingual others speaking
a variety of languages deriving from south China, north China, south east Asia and England. The one thing virtually
unknown in this 'Chinese' diaspora category is a monolingual Chinese-speaker. What gives the unsatisfactory everyday term
some analytical usefulness is the tensions it creates in all those of Chinese or partly Chinese descent outside China, between
heritage and environment.
In our part of the world the Chinese and the British (or Anglo-Irish) have been the two most important diasporas. We don't
(yet) have centres for the British diaspora because Australian studies is itself largely concerned with this. The British,
specifically the English, have built states where they went and this is their greatest legacy. Chinese migrants had learned from
long experience to expect little of governments, and to rely much on the networks of kinship, culture and trust. They have
played the role for a millennium in south east Asia, and a century and a half in Australian and south west Pacific, of
economic innovators and cultural minorities, challenging dominant cultures by their otherness, their skills, and their ability to
tame hostile frontiers. They deserve sustained study, and we hope this Centre will, over the long term, provide it.
I mentioned a practical reason, also, which explains why here and now. The study of Chinese outside China at the ANU has
a long history, going back to Patrick FitzGerald and Charles Price, but it's fair to say the ANU became a world leader in the
field when tonight's speaker, Wang Gungwu, came here in 1968 as the second occupant of the chair of Far Eastern History.
He attracted a number of outstanding students from Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, including Yong Chin Fatt, Yeng
Ching-hwang, Steve Fitzgerald and Ng Chin-keong. He also brought to Canberra in 1976 (I believe) Jennifer Cushman, then
a young graduate working on Thailand-China connections. She remained until her premature death in 1989 wholly
concerned with Chinese in South East Asia and Australia and worked with Gungwu in a number of important book projects.
Jennifer's sudden death, not long after Professor Wang's departure for Hong Kong, deprived us of our two key scholars in
this area but also in a curious way galvanised us into action. We organised a series of lectures in honour of Jennifer, which
may have pushed both Craig Reynolds and I further into this field than we would otherwise have gone. Those lectures
became a successful book in 1996, Sojourners and Settlers. We also launched a memorial fund, which we used to help
younger scholars in the field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies visit the ANU or Cornell, the other university Jennifer cared
about.
In 1996 another of our former ANU colleagues, Ben Batson, died suddenly and tragically in Singapore where he was
lecturing at the National University of Singapore. He had helped and supported us with the Jennifer Cushman fund and
lectures, probably as much because of his affection for Jennifer as for his admiration for our goals. He very generously left
US$100,000 in his will for the Jennifer Cushman fund. It is that bequest, in addition to a grant last year from the Chiang
Ching kuo Foundation, which has made this Centre possible. We will use these funds for a specialist post to be advertised
soon as a research co-ordinator, and for a serious of lectures, workshops and conference. The Centre also supports a course
on Chinese southern diaspora in the Faculty of Asian Studies, which has reinvented a course first taught by Wang Guangwu
and Jennifer Cushman.
Finally to return to our distinguished speaker, you are impatient to hear. From what I have said already you know
why he was the only person we could ask to give our inaugural lecture. Although also very distinguished as an
historian of China, he has done more than anyone to create the academic field of study on the Chinese southern
diaspora, even though he may not approve the term. We are always delighted and inspired to have him return. We
owe this Centre, and to an extent the field it represents, to him.
Professor Wang Gungwu provided a stimulating history of the field in the inaugural CSCSD Public Lecture entitled 'A Single Chinese Diaspora?: Some Historical Reflections'. In a talk peppered with autobiographical anecdotes and insights gained as one of the pioneer scholars, he reminded all those present of the complexity of ethnic identity in 1999 and the folly of overgeneralization.
Having returned to the ANU to start the Centre off on the right foot, Professor Wang also warned that the term 'diaspora' needs to be used with utmost care since it might actually encourage ethnic essentialism amongst insensitive academics or even anti-Chinese feelings in some quarters.
The world's pre-eminent authority on the Chinese diaspora, Professor Wang was born in Suryabaya, grew up in Malaysia, and took his Ph.D at the University of London. The first Malaysian to hold the Chair of History at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, he moved to Canberra as Professor of Far Eastern History in the Reserarch School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University in 1968. Here he established the first major school for Chinese diaspora studies, supervising many important doctoral studies. Among his many distinctions, he was Director of the RSPACS [now RSPAS] from 1975-80, President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in 1978-80, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1980-83, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong from 1985-93. Professor Wang is currently Director of the East Asia Centre of the National University of Singapore.
His many books include: The Chinese Minority in Southeast Asia (1978), Community and Nation: Essays on Southeast Asia and the Chinese (1981), and China and the Chinese Overseas (1991). Since its foundation in 1992, he has been President of the International Society for the Study of the Chinese Overseas.