Date of Award

8-5-2025

Thesis Type

PhD

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Department

Department of Chinese Studies

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

During the late Qing and the Republican period, the longstanding extensive corridors of Chinese labour migration to the Nanyang were supplemented by a significant flow of elite travel and cultural and professional exchange between China and Nanyang. A group of transnational intellectual elites came into being whose lives and life-work spanned geographical and cultural space between a colonised and Westernised Southeast Asia and a China on her transition to modernity. Among them were Lim Boon Keng, Wu Lien-Teh, Wong Nai Siong and Khoo Seok Wan, the four case studies in this dissertation. An investigation of these elites either from Nanyang or China finds that they were all exposed to Western learning whether they had received Chinese or English education, and both China and Nanyang had provided them a stage where they could realise themselves. They brought to China new ideas, practices, and knowledge of Western science and medicine, and spread traditional Chinese culture to Nanyang and the West. This dissertation was motivated by the desire to understand why these four Chinese could have achieved what they set out to achieve, not only in Nanyang but also in China, or vice versa. This project seeks to interpret firstly, the making of these Chinese transnational intellectual elites; secondly, the contributions of these intellectual elites as public intellectuals and culture brokers to the modernisation and development of China and Nanyang. The dissertation positions the role of Nanyang during the late Qing and early Republic of China, and analyses the emergence of a China-Nanyang intellectual corridor which was built and rebuilt thanks to the circulation of intellectuals and ideas during that period of time. Next an account of the biographies of the four intellectual elites is given. Based on their biographies, an analysis is made of career-making across the Nanyang-China intellectual corridor. Apart from that, the study highlights the contributions of the four elites as public intellectuals and culture brokers. In conclusion, the following points have been reached: (a) There exists an intellectual corridor of exchange between diaspora and homeland for Chinese transnational elites during the late 19th and early 20th century with a “Corridor-niche”pattern. (b) The Chinese transnational intellectual elites have played a role as culture brokers and public intellectuals during China’s transition period to modernisation. (c) All four men had been mutually formed by China and Nanyang, and made great contributions to both. In particular, it argues that the construction of an intellectual corridor between China and Nanyang at the turn of the century as a shared project among these closely related individuals arose at a particular historical moment in China’s need for Western knowledge, and colonial Nanyang’s ability to provide it. The roles that these transnational Chinese intellectuals played is particularly valuable, because they issued from a position of hybridity between Western and Eastern learning, stemming from the Nanyang exposure to Western colonial education and culture.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Thesis (PhD) – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, 2025.

Additional Files
Lin Lan_CA.pdf (178 kB)
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