Mirror of great powers: China, America and the new era of rivalry through Wang Gungwu's eyes

America now stands as the world's most powerful naval force, with carriers visible in every ocean, and the conversation opens on that image. Host Keith Yap places two slogans side by side: Donald Trump's “Make America Great Again” and a Chinese aspiration that has circulated for at least a century to restore greatness after near collapse. For Wang Gungwu the parallel is not coincidence; one side carries the memory of an empire that almost vanished, the other the ambition of a maritime hegemon seeking renewal. Both leaders speak the language of the modern nation-state, yet each represents a contemporary form of an ancient civilization. That mirror metaphor guides the whole talk: same words, different histories.

Geography returns: maritime powers, continental China and 500 years

Wang argues geography has returned to the center of geopolitics and sets up a simple contrast: for 500 years Atlantic maritime powers shaped the world, while China remained a continental power for millennia. Except for small coastal flotillas to police piracy, China never built a professional navy because the idea that danger could come from the sea was absent. In the 19th century a few dozen British ships operating from Southeast Asian bases sailed across the Indian Ocean, defeated the empire and imposed unequal treaties, billing that blind spot. Behind the shock lay the material base of the Industrial Revolution — naval technology and artillery. That China only fully internalized the sea problem after being defeated by a rapidly navalizing Japan shows how deep the continental mindset ran.

That trauma also built the memory of what China calls the Century of Humiliation and turned “grow rich and strong so we are never struck from the sea again” into lasting strategy. Wang stresses the goal is not expansionist but defensive — accumulating science, technology and wealth to avoid ever being vulnerable from the sea. For the United States sea control is not only military but an architecture of logistics and finance that commands the oceans. The asymmetry between the two superpowers appears here: one tradition sees the sea as its natural domain, the other learned to govern land. The difference shows up not only in fleet numbers but in how each state imagines itself.

The origins of the nation-state provide one of the most instructive stretches. Wang does not reduce the rebellion of the 13 colonies to taxes and the Tea Party anecdote; the deeper driver was the Enlightenment. The French-born ideal that citizens could govern themselves, beyond kings, emperors and clergy, offered a new order. That same ideal fed the French Revolution and the Jefferson generation's break with Britain, producing two new nation forms at once. France struggled in a world still of empires, cycling through Napoleon and five republics, while America, helped by Franco-British rivalry, forged a new state from united colonies. At the start equality was limited to white men, excluding the enslaved and indigenous peoples, yet the model was now a working system displayed to the world.

China's hydraulic memory: Yu, floods and centralized bureaucracy

China's idea of the state comes from another river story. The Yellow River's floods could not be managed village by village; the basin's communities had to coordinate and tame water collectively. The mythic Yu became a ruler because he organized that coordination, and flood-control methods hardened into a template for centralized bureaucracy. The center proved useful beyond floods — against locusts, drought and external threats — nurturing the idea that if the central apparatus was efficient and the ruler virtuous, problems could be solved. That practical experience merged with the moral framework of the Mandate of Heaven: a good ruler holds the mandate because he cares for the people, and when virtue collapses the dynasty falls. Each dynastic change was thus narrated as a return to better values after decline, and nostalgia for better past values became the language of politics.

That hydraulic origin helps explain why borders were never sacred in the Chinese imagination as they became in the West. For a long time the empire saw itself not as a state among states but as a civilized space with no neighbours, with civilized order inside and barbarism outside, and influence faded at edges rather than cut by lines. Standardizing script was part of that civilizational project: different spoken dialects but one written system held the realm together. Wang also corrects the shorthand for the tribute order; it was not simple exploitation but a flexible network producing legitimacy and stability, stretching from Tang and Song to Ming and Qing, bargaining trade and security, even opening extra ports for strategic materials. Reading it through modern “inter-state” language guarantees a misreading of China.

Conquest dynasties complicate the picture further. When northern peoples occupied large parts of China, they kept and adopted the bureaucratic apparatus despite their military edge, because it was the rational way to run rivers, taxes and population. Under Ming and Qing the tribute network gained flexibility, with tailored ports and supervised trade routes. While Westphalia entrenched the idea of sovereign equal states in Europe, China still imagined a civilization-centered order. The modern nation-state arrived in China in the 20th century as a very new garment, and its seams are still felt.

The trap of concepts: translating tribute to nation-state

For Wang a major source of present tension lies in translating concepts. Words like nation, sovereignty and border are products of modern conditions, while China's classical lexicon was built around ideas of all under heaven, civilization and virtuous governance. Forcing one vocabulary onto the other produces chronic misunderstanding. Squeezing China into a Westphalian template either romanticizes or demonizes the tribute past, yet that order was a rational response for ideology and administration. That is why the warning recurs in the talk: our words are very modern and describe modern conditions; judging the past with today's concepts means we are talking about today, not the past.

The “two Wests” distinction completes the translation error. Wang insists modernization should not be seen as a single package; within the West there is a liberty-emphasizing strand and an equality-emphasizing socialist strand. What China has done since the late 19th century is take the West's technology while preserving its core values. The debate among reformers and revolutionaries ran along that line: how much West, how much China? The official formula became socialism with Chinese characteristics — fusing the ideal of a central, moral, caring administration with the promise of equality. Wang describes it not as copying but as selective synthesis; you do not have to take the whole West, you can take part and keep your ethical core.

The West's two faces and China's choice: technology yes, core intact

The governance expression of that synthesis appears in the one-party ideal. Wang says China aspires to a model tested at city scale but unproven at continental scale — a good-governance dream of a disciplined, corruption-free party that people trust. Xi Jinping's language of discipline, dedication and trust is the current idiom for that dream. Yet Wang is sober: most of China's energy goes to its own domestic problems; there is neither appetite nor capacity to assume responsibility for running the world, and the line “it would be stupid to dominate the world” sits clearly in the talk. The Singapore example shows the scale problem; the meritocratic, pragmatic administration that works in a small city-state cannot be copied by formula to a country of 1.4 billion. Each place must find its own path, at its own cost.

On a Huntington-style thesis that a clash of civilizations is inevitable, Wang is distant. Clash is not structural destiny but the accumulation of deep misunderstanding. When the West reads China's party-state insistence only as authoritarianism, it misses the hydraulic-state legacy, the trauma of poverty and invasion, and the drive never to be weak again. When China sees the West solely as a hegemonic maritime power, it under-reads the Enlightenment ideal of citizen equality and the practice of law and pluralism. Because the mutual mirrors are fogged, every move looks like a threat. Reducing misunderstanding requires understanding the historical roots of institutions more than guessing intentions.

Identity marks the most human stop. Drawing on Singapore, the professor reminds us every person naturally holds multiple identities: a role in family, at work, in the city, among friends, all layered. Legal identity — what a passport says — is only one layer, and a very recent one. A few decades ago people moved across Southeast Asia without passports when they had jobs; colonial administrations let workers circulate if employment was genuine. Nation-state and passport are inventions of the last two centuries and do not describe the universal human condition. Reducing borders to a single identity impoverishes that richness. Answering “who are you” with only a passport is like mistaking a single official photo for the whole album.

Many identities, very new passports: a lesson from Singapore

In the final stretch the talk reflects on Will Durant's line about being choked with news and starved of history. Wang is not dogmatic; not everyone needs to study history, he says, but those who know history have a responsibility to tell it. The past is worth learning no matter how distant, if it carries a lesson that touches the present; like Western references to Plato and Aristotle, the Chinese tradition does not hesitate to reach far back. What matters is not the age of the lesson but its vitality. A person who knows history has the right to say “I think this is relevant,” and should not be afraid even if wrong, because the very act of carrying the past into the present keeps collective memory alive. In the fast news cycle that memory acts as a brake on hasty judgment.

Closing, Wang narrates his own generation's witness — empire, occupation, revolutions and the birth of new nations — with quiet humility and avoids a single prescription. His suggestion is to picture geopolitics not as a chessboard but as different riverbeds: each civilization flows in its own channel, managing its floods and droughts differently, yet reaching the same sea. America and China, as modern nation-state forms of two ancient civilizations, are like two rivers opening into that shared sea. Understanding them requires reading geography, institutions and identities together. That effort is as simple as turning down the noise of the news cycle to hear history's whisper, and just as difficult.

Wang's Singapore emphasis should also be read through scale and migration. The city-state's meritocratic pragmatism grew from a society largely built by migration, a practice that normalized multiple identities in daily life. Applying the same formula at China's scale brings not only administrative capacity challenges but also questions of social fabric. So the phrase “find its own path” is not vague wishfulness but realism about how different scales carry different costs.

Another layer on history and news concerns verifiability. The talk rides on Wang's personal witness and scholarly accumulation — archives, fieldwork and long observation together. Yet however authoritative a single voice is, it cannot give the whole picture. The listener's job is to cross-read the account with CRS reports, scholarly articles and current political-economy analysis. Wang himself counsels against dogmatism; those who know the past should tell it while admitting they may be wrong.

The brief treatment of intra-European diversity in the French and American revolutions can be read as deliberate simplification. Wang keeps focus on the Atlantic Enlightenment and the first nation-state experiments, leaving colonialism's shadow and imperial continuities in the background. That choice preserves clarity and time, but leaves a gap the listener should balance with complementary reading. Every historical narrative is a frame; what lies outside the frame is not absent.

Finally, the river metaphor itself deserves thought. Two rivers reaching the same sea is not a guarantee of harmony but participation in the same water cycle. Rivers move by their own logics of flood, drought and channel shift; the sea brings them together without merging them. How America and China cohabit will likewise depend less on a single bargain than on continuous water management — the maintenance of institutions and concepts.