WANG GUNGWU is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong. He taught at the University of Malaya in Singapore, and later at Kuala Lumpur, and was for many years at the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, of which he remains an Emeritus Professor. RONALD SKELDON is a Reader in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. A graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and Toronto, he has carried out fieldwork in Peru and Papua New Guinea and has worked for the United Nations in Bangkok, in several countries in South and Southeast Asia, and in the Pacific.