Prof Wang Gungwu, CBE, BBM, PBM 王賡武教授, CBE, BBM, PBM

Award

Doctor of Humanities honoris causa 榮譽人文學博士學位

Year of Award

2017

Biography

For six decades, Prof Wang Gungwu has been a devoted scholar and researcher, teacher and educator, as well as a servant of the public. He is an eminent historian in modern Chinese history and an international authority on the history of the overseas Chinese.

Prof Wang served as Vice Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1995. He led HKU to establish The University of Hong Kong Foundation for Educational Development & Research in order to foster stronger links with the community and to enhance the institution’s capacity for teaching and research. He himself acted as a model of a socially engaged intellectual leader in Hong Kong: he served as Chairman of the Council for Performing Arts and Chairman of the Environmental Pollution Consultative Committee, and accepted an appointment as a member of the Executive Council of the then colonial Government in 1989. Upon his retirement from HKU, Prof Wang moved to the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he served, among other academic and leadership posts, as Chairman of the Governing Board of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy until 2017. Prof Wang has been named a University Professor at NUS since 2007, and is currently Chairman of the Management Board of its East Asian Institute and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Prof Wang received multiple honours and awards in the course of his illustrious career. He was conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws by Monash University, Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, and Wawasan Open University, Penang; and an honorary Doctor of Letters (D Litt) by the University of Sydney, the University of Hull, The University of Hong Kong, The Open University of Hong Kong, and the University of Cambridge. Prof Wang is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University as well. He is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities; a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; an honorary member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as well as an Academician of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. For his outstanding research achievements in the history of China and Southeast Asia, he won the Academic Prize of the Asian Culture Prizes established by the Japanese city of Fukuoka in 1994.

Prof Wang was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humanities honoris causa by Lingnan University.