History of Sinology/Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Singapore and Malaysia — Sinology in the Nanyang Tradition
by Onn Huann Jan 安焕然 (Professor of Chinese Studies, New Era University College, Malaysia)
Contributed lecture, originally presented at the 3rd World Sinologists Conference (第三届世界汉学大会), Beijing Language and Culture University · World Sinology Centre, in cooperation with the China International Friendship Association, 30 May – 5 June 2026.
Abstract
The ethnic-Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaysia have for over a century inhabited a borderland of trans-regional, multi-cultural exchange. Their intellectual heritage and cultural practice carry the distinctive imprint of cross-boundary mobility and pluralist contact. The question therefore arises: can a recognisable Singapore–Malaysia perspective (新马视角, Xinma shijiao) on Sinology be articulated? This chapter examines three representative scholars from the Nanyang Sinological scene — Tay Lian-soo (Zheng Liangshu) 郑良树, Wong Yoon-wah (Wang Runhua) 王润华, and Lai Swee-fo (Lai Ruihe) 赖瑞和 — and through their differing methodological orientations attempts to delineate the openings, innovations, and continuing tensions of a Nanyang-grounded Sinology.
1. Why a Singapore–Malaysia Perspective?
Sinology has long been organised around the polarity of within and without China — a Chinese neidi (境内) Sinology shadowed by various jingwai (境外) traditions: Western, Japanese, Korean, and others, each with its own methodological signature. The Nanyang region — Singapore and Malaysia in particular — occupies a third position. Its Chinese-language academic community is neither fully neidi (rooted in mainland China) nor straightforwardly jingwai in the European or Japanese sense. Its scholars work in a Chinese-language tradition that is simultaneously diasporic, postcolonial, and Southeast-Asian.
The challenge for Nanyang Sinology is to recognise this hybrid condition as a productive vantage point rather than as a deficit. Must the Chinese department of a Malaysian university merely replicate the curricula of mainland Chinese institutions? Are the only legitimate forms of Sinology those that hew to a "traditional" or "orthodox" pattern, with any departure from it counting as bianzhi (变质, "degeneration")? Or can the cultural soil of the Nanyang — its complexity, its plurality, its cross-cultural friction — generate genuinely new perspectives in the discipline?
This chapter argues that the answer to the second question is affirmative, and pursues it through three biographical-methodological case studies.
2. Tay Lian-soo 郑良树 (1940–2016): Traditional Sinology as Anchor, Ethnic-Chinese Studies as Vocation
Often acclaimed as "Malaysia's first Sinologist" (马来西亚汉学第一人), Tay Lian-soo (Zheng Liangshu 郑良树) studied at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, where he became the first Malaysian to earn a doctorate in Chinese literature. After returning to Malaysia, he chaired the Chinese Department at the University of Malaya; later he was appointed Professor of Chinese at The Chinese University of Hong Kong; in retirement he returned home to direct the Institute for the Study of Ethnic Chinese Communities and Culture at Southern University College.
For Tay, traditional Sinology — the rigorous philological study of pre-modern Chinese texts — remained the discipline's main body (本体). The study of the local ethnic-Chinese community he understood as a complementary and unavoidable duty (义务) of the Malaysian-Chinese intellectual. His own work straddled both poles. In a much-cited essay, "From the History of Chinese Education to the Ebb and Flow of Malaysian-Chinese Culture" (〈从华教史论大马中华文化的起承转合〉), he wrote: "We have no Moses; there is no one to lead us out to sea. We have no Noah's Ark; there is no objective sanctuary in our environment. What we do have is the spiritual heritage and the moral example of our forebears — and on the strength of their spirit and character we must make Chinese culture grow on this soil, for the sake of all Malaysian culture."
In 2004 Tay was the moving force behind the inaugural Malaysian Traditional Sinology Conference at Southern College, together with its proceedings volume. To this day, that conference series continues — hosted in rotation by the Chinese departments of Malaysian universities. The very name "Malaysian Traditional Sinology" (马来西亚传统汉学) carries Tay's deliberate intent to anchor local Chinese studies in the philological tradition while keeping it institutionally rooted in Malaysia.
3. Wong Yoon-wah 王润华 (b. 1941): World Chinese-Language Literature and the "Lu Xun in Southeast Asia" School
Formerly chair of the Department of Chinese at the National University of Singapore and now Senior Professor at Southern University College, Malaysia, Wong Yoon-wah brings to Nanyang Sinology an entirely different orientation. His central category is World Chinese-Language Literature (世界华文文学) — and within it the broader notion of a world Sinophone-Chinese (世界华语文) cultural field. This perspective foregrounds the plurality of the Sinophone world rather than its unity with the Chinese homeland, and aligns with what Anglophone scholarship distinguishes as Chinese Studies rather than Sinology in the classical sense.
Wong's distinctive contribution is his programme of research on "Lu Xun in Southeast Asia" (东南亚的鲁迅学) — a cross-regional, postcolonial reading of Lu Xun's reception in the Nanyang. Around this theme he built a research team and a body of work. His argument, in essence, is that the early anti-colonial and anti-imperial experience of Singapore and Malaysia helped transform Lu Xun into a transregional symbol of soft power for the Southeast-Asian Chinese world. Lu Xun's influence, in Wong's reading, exceeded the strictly literary: it permeated the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Nanyang, becoming a moral resource for anti-colonial resistance and a touchstone for the construction of a local canon of modern Chinese-language literature and national-cultural identity. The most characteristic feature of Lu Xun's afterlife in the Nanyang Chinese community, Wong argues, is its spirit of resistance. His significance there is at once literary, political, and ethical.
4. Lai Swee-fo 赖瑞和 (1953–2022): Curricular Innovation at Southern College
A graduate of the East Asian Studies department at Princeton, the historian and essayist Lai Swee-fo (赖瑞和) — author also of the literary travelogue Du Fu's Five Cities (《杜甫的五城》) — played the decisive role in designing the founding curriculum of the Chinese department at Southern College in 1997. This was the first Chinese department of a Chinese-community-founded private institution of higher learning in Malaysia. Lai's curriculum gave compulsory weight to local Chinese studies — Malaysian-Chinese literature, Malaysian-Chinese history (in both semesters), as well as a rigorous programme of guided readings — choices that were intellectually incisive and also, at the time, controversial.
The curricular template Lai shaped at Southern College subsequently exerted a stimulating, dialogic influence on the Chinese departments later established at other Nanyang institutions: the Department of Chinese at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), New Era University College, Han Chiang University College, and Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman. The horizon of Sinology in Malaysia was thereby shifted: the dichotomy between classical and modern-contemporary studies was loosened, and even classical research came to be pursued in dialogue with Malaysian-Chinese classical-style poetry, epitaphs, and other local archival material.
5. Towards a Nanyang Sinology
Can the curricula and research programmes of Malaysia's Chinese departments be shaped so that they speak intelligibly to the lived experience of Nanyang's younger generation — so that local students approach Chinese history, Chinese literature, and Chinese culture from vantage points that are genuinely their own? Can the same departments also pursue the literary, historical, and philosophical study of the local Chinese community itself? The work of Tay, Wong, and Lai suggests that they can — and that doing so widens, rather than dilutes, the Sinological horizon. The hope is that the distinctive observational stance and the research yield of a Nanyang Sinology, by virtue of their very particularity, will come to receive the attention and engagement they deserve within the international scholarly community.
Bilingual Original
The original Chinese-language version of this lecture, including the full passages on Tay, Wong, and Lai cited above, is preserved at 《漢學研究的新馬視角》 (Chapter 13, simplified Chinese).
Author
Onn Huann Jan (安焕然) is Professor in the Department of Chinese, New Era University College (Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia). He is a leading specialist in Malaysian-Chinese history and the historiography of Southeast-Asian Chinese communities, and a long-standing convenor of the Malaysian Traditional Sinology conference series.