David Wang (Australia)

Wang served on many other community bodies and was Foundation Chairman of the Dai Loong Association. In 1975-77 he was chairman of the Chinese Professional and Business Association of Victoria. It was widely expected that he would be elected as Lord Mayor of Melbourne, but his early death from a heart attack prevented this.

In 1965 Wang, on the nomination of Calwell (whose electorate covered the City of Melbourne), was appointed one of the first two Chinese-Australian Justices of the Peace in Australia. In 1969 he was elected to the Melbourne City Council, becoming the first Chinese-Australian to win a seat in local government. As a Councillor he led the push for the extension of shopping hours and the establishment of new parks in the city, and worked on the approval of Melbourne’s Chinatown Project.

The business grew rapidly and by the 1960s Wang was a leading businessman and a leader of the Chinese community. The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes:

In Melbourne in 1942 he met Mabel Chen, an Australian-born Chinese, who chose the English name David for him. In 1947 they were married in Singapore, where he opened a business importing woollen goods from Australia. These connections to Australia enabled him to gain a seven-year Australian business residence permit in 1948, despite the then-official White Australia Policy, which prevented Asian immigration. The permit was issued by the Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, who became a close friend of the Wang family, despite his lifelong support for White Australia. He opened his furniture business in Little Bourke Street in 1950.

Wang was born in Haimen county, Jiangsu province, China, the son of a prosperous peasant farmer, and studied radio communications in Shanghai before entering the military academy in Chongqing (Chungking), (then the temporary capital of China) in 1939. Promoted lieutenant in 1941, he served in the intelligence section of the general headquarters. Following the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, he was sent to Australia as a captain with the Chinese military mission.

David Neng Hwan Wang (12 February 1920 – 1 January 1978), was a Chinese-Australian businessman and the first Chinese-Australian elected to the Melbourne City Council.