Wang Gungwu, (; born 9 October 1930) is a Chinese-Singaporean historian, sinologist, and writer. He is a historian of China and Southeast Asia. He has studied and written about the Chinese diaspora, but he has objected to the use of the word diaspora to describe the migration of Chinese from China because both it mistakenly implies that all overseas Chinese are the same and has been used to perpetuate fears of a "Chinese threat", under the control of the Chinese government. An expert on the Chinese tianxia ("all under heaven") concept, he was the first to suggest its application to the contemporary world as an American Tianxia. Background Wang was born in Surabaya, Indonesia to ethnic Chinese parents from Taizhou, Jiangsu and grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia. He completed his secondary education in Anderson School, an English medium school in Ipoh. Wang studied history in the University of Malaya, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. He was a founding member of the University Socialist Club and its founding president in 1953. He holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1957) for his thesis The structure of power in North China during the Five Dynasties. He taught at the University of Malaya (in both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur). He was one of the founders of the Malaysian political party Gerakan, but he was not personally directly involved in the party's activities. In 1965, he chaired a Committee to review the curriculum of Nanyang University. The Committee reported in May 1965. Meanwhile, in August 1965, Singapore separated from the Federation of Malaysia as an independent republic. In September 1965, the committee was released and the university accepted the recommendations, triggering students protests, petitions, and boycotts of classes and examinations. In 1968 he went to Canberra to become Professor of Far Eastern History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at the Australian National University. He took a turn as Director of RSPAS, 1975–80. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1995. In 2007, Wang became the third person to be named University Professor by the National University of Singapore. In 1994, Wang was awarded the Academic Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize by the Japanese city of Fukuoka. On 12 June 2009, he was one of ten eminent persons to receive an honorary degree