History of Sinology/Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Singapore and Malaysia — Sinology in the Nanyang Tradition
1. The Nanyang as a Third Position
Sinology has long been organised around the polarity of within and without China — a Chinese neidi (境内) scholarship shadowed by various jingwai (境外) traditions: Western, Japanese, Korean, and others, each with its own methodological signature.[1] 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 jingwai in the European or Japanese sense. Its scholars work in a Chinese-language tradition that is at once diasporic, postcolonial, and Southeast Asian, shaped for more than a century by trans-regional, multicultural exchange.[2]
The central question is whether this hybrid condition can be articulated as a distinctive Singapore–Malaysia perspective (新马视角, Xinma shijiao) on Sinology — a productive vantage point rather than a deficit. Must the Chinese department of a Malaysian university merely replicate the curricula of mainland institutions? Are the only legitimate forms of Sinology those that follow a "traditional" or "orthodox" pattern, with any departure counting as bianzhi (变质, "degeneration")? Or can the cultural soil of the Nanyang — its plurality and its cross-cultural friction — generate genuinely new perspectives in the discipline? The careers of three representative scholars suggest that it can.[3]
2. Tay Lian-soo (Zheng Liangshu 郑良树, 1940–2016): Traditional Sinology as Anchor
Often acclaimed as "Malaysia's first Sinologist" (马来西亚汉学第一人), Tay Lian-soo studied at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, becoming the first Malaysian to earn a doctorate in Chinese literature. He subsequently chaired the Chinese Department at the University of Malaya, held a professorship at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in retirement directed the Institute for the Study of Ethnic Chinese Communities and Culture at Southern University College.[4]
For Tay, traditional Sinology — the rigorous philological study of pre-modern texts — remained the discipline's main body (本体), while the study of the local ethnic-Chinese community was a complementary duty (义务) of the Malaysian-Chinese scholar. His own work straddled both poles. In the much-cited essay "From the History of Chinese Education to the Ebb and Flow of Malaysian-Chinese Culture" he wrote that, lacking any Moses to lead them out to sea and any Noah's Ark for sanctuary, Malaysian Chinese possessed only the spiritual heritage and moral example of their forebears, on whose strength Chinese culture had to be made to grow in local soil, for the sake of Malaysian culture as a whole.[5] In 2004 he was the driving force behind the inaugural Malaysian Traditional Sinology Conference at Southern College and its proceedings volume; the series continues today, hosted in rotation by the Chinese departments of Malaysian universities.[6]
3. Wong Yoon-wah (Wang Runhua 王润华, b. 1941): World Chinese-Language Literature
Formerly chair of the Department of Chinese at the National University of Singapore and later Senior Professor at Southern University College, Wong Yoon-wah brings an entirely different orientation. His central category is World Chinese-Language Literature (世界华文文学), and within it the broader field of a world Sinophone (世界华语文) culture — a perspective that foregrounds the plurality of the Sinophone world and aligns with what Anglophone scholarship distinguishes as Chinese Studies rather than classical Sinology.[7]
Wong's most 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 which he built a research team and a substantial body of work. His argument is that the early anti-colonial and anti-imperial experience of Singapore and Malaysia transformed Lu Xun into a trans-regional symbol of cultural soft power for the Southeast-Asian Chinese world. Lu Xun's influence, in Wong's reading, exceeded the strictly literary, permeating the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Nanyang and furnishing a moral resource for anti-colonial resistance and for the construction of a local canon of modern Chinese-language literature.[8]
4. Lai Swee-fo (Lai Ruihe 赖瑞和, 1953–2022): Curricular Innovation
A graduate of the East Asian Studies department at Princeton, the historian and essayist Lai Swee-fo — author 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, the first such department at a Chinese-community-founded private institution of higher learning in Malaysia.[9] His curriculum gave compulsory weight to local Chinese studies — Malaysian-Chinese literature and history across both semesters — alongside a rigorous programme of guided readings: choices that were intellectually incisive and, at the time, controversial.[10]
The template Lai shaped at Southern College subsequently influenced the Chinese departments later established at other Nanyang institutions — Nanyang Technological University in 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.[11]
5. Towards a Nanyang Sinology
Taken together, the careers of Tay, Wong, and Lai outline the contours of a Sinology that is grounded in, rather than merely transplanted to, the Nanyang. Such a Sinology asks whether the curricula and research programmes of Malaysia's Chinese departments can speak intelligibly to the lived experience of the region's younger generation — so that local students approach Chinese history, literature, and culture from vantage points genuinely their own — while also pursuing the literary, historical, and philosophical study of the local Chinese community itself. The work of these three scholars suggests that doing so widens, rather than dilutes, the Sinological horizon. The distinctive observational stance and research yield of a Nanyang Sinology deserve, by virtue of their very particularity, fuller attention and engagement within the international scholarly community.[12]
Bibliography
Tay Lian-soo (Zheng Liangshu). "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〉.
Wong Yoon-wah (Wang Runhua). Lu Xun in Southeast Asia and related studies on World Chinese-Language Literature.
Lai Swee-fo (Lai Ruihe). Du Fu's Five Cities 《杜甫的五城》.
Notes
- ↑ This chapter draws on the work of Onn Huann Jan (安焕然), Professor of Chinese Studies at New Era University College, Malaysia, whose synthesis of the Nanyang Sinological tradition — presented as "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective on Sinological Research" (《汉学研究的新马视角》) — underlies the account given here.
- ↑ On the diasporic and postcolonial situation of Nanyang Chinese scholarship, see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective."
- ↑ Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," framing argument.
- ↑ On Tay Lian-soo's career, see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §2.
- ↑ Tay Lian-soo, "From the History of Chinese Education to the Ebb and Flow of Malaysian-Chinese Culture," quoted in Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective."
- ↑ On the Malaysian Traditional Sinology Conference (Southern College, 2004– ), see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §2.
- ↑ On Wong Yoon-wah and World Chinese-Language Literature, see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §3.
- ↑ On the "Lu Xun in Southeast Asia" school, see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §3.
- ↑ On Lai Swee-fo and the founding of the Southern College Chinese department (1997), see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §4.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ On the influence of the Southern College curriculum across Nanyang institutions, see Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," §4.
- ↑ Onn, "The Singapore–Malaysia Perspective," concluding argument.