Escaping the burdens of Chineseness

Abstract

Although Singapore currently makes it impossible in the male descent line, departing from Chineseness has been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian history. In modern nationalist times the paucity of alternative terms in Southeast Asian and European language has made the overused Cina a problematic label, impossible to detach from a very large northern neighbour and from many cultural stereotypes. Naturally many local-born and culturally hybrid citizens have sought to escape from it. The best documented mass case is the nineteenth century Philippines. Peranakan Indonesians have not found it so easy to shed this inappropriate label even though it has occasionally been wielded as a death threat. ‘Outsider’ status also has its uses. This presentation will be chiefly concerned with the obstacles for Peranakan in departing from Chineseness. It will argue nevertheless that many Indonesians are quietly succeeding in taking this path.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Peranakan
• Chinese
• identity
• hybridity
• assimilation

Notes

¹See in particular the burst of fine analyses in the 1980s, led by Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; and Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence. In addition to the library of books which followed this wave, journals were established such as Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (from 1995), Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (1997) and Asian Ethnicity (1999). Comparable literature on Asia was slow to appear, but is now well represented by Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China; Duara, Rescuing China from the Nation; T⊘nnesson and Antlöv (eds.), Asian Forms of the Nation; Elson, The Idea of Indonesia; and Reid, Imperial Alchemy, Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia.

²Edmund Scott, ‘An exact discourse’ [1606], in The Voyage of Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, ed. Sir William Foster, 174.

³Ong-Tae-Hae [Wang Dahai], The Chinaman Abroad, 33.

⁴Anthony Reid, ‘Flows and Seepages in the Long-term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia,’ 21–41.

⁵Wickberg, ‘The Chinese mestizo in Philippine History’, 62–100; Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, chapter 9.

⁶Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia’, 55–6.

⁷Wickberg, ‘Anti-Sinicism and Chinese Identity Options in the Philippines’, 174–5.

⁸Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia’, 84–5.

⁹The importance of this the rupture of 1911 between Chinese and Indonesian imaginings is emphasized in Shiraishi, ‘Anti-Sinicism in Java's New Order’, 187–207.

¹⁰Elson, The Idea of Indonesia.

¹¹Penang Charter of Justice of 1807, as cited in Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies’, 71.

¹²Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies’, 74–5. This process of assimilation had already been chronicled by The Siauw Giap, ‘Religion and Overseas Chinese Assimilation’, 67–83.

¹³Rinder, ‘Strangers in the Land’, 253.

¹⁴Chirot and Reid, eds., Essential Outsiders.

¹⁵Purdey, Anti-Chinese Violence.

¹⁶Mackie, ‘Changing Economic Roles and Ethnic Identities’, 237.

¹⁷While anti-communism marked the whole New Order regime, a degree of paranoia about Chinese influence appears to have been specific to Suharto, often handicapping the foreign ministry in pursuing a flexible policy in Indonesia's national interest.

¹⁸Translated in Coppel and Suryadinata, ‘The use of the Terms “Tjina” and “Tionghoa” in Indonesia’, 106.

¹⁹Ibid., 97–103.

²⁰Purdey, Anti-Chinese Violence, 22.

²¹Ascher, ‘From Oil to Timber’, 55.

²²This process is documented in Robison, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital.

²³Arendt, Antisemitism, 25.

²⁴Hefner, Civil Islam, 202–4.

²⁵Purdey, Anti-Chinese Violence, 38–105.

²⁶Gerry van Klinken, Communal Violence; Colombijn and Lindblad, eds., Roots of Violence in Indonesia.

²⁷Tim Relawan, ‘Korban Kekerasan Seksual Kerusuhan Mei 1998’.

²⁸ Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 July 1998.

²⁹Reid, ‘The Kuala Lumpur Riots’, 258–78.

³⁰Suryadinata, Arifin and Ananta, Indonesia's Population, 73.

³¹I am most grateful to Professor Terry Hull, Department of Demography, ANU, for this detailed data from the census, which has only slowly been released by the Bureau of Statistics. Suryadinata, Arifin and Ananta, in Indonesia's Population, 75–79, were obliged to operate on the basis of extrapolations, since the published figures then available provided data only on the eight largest ethnic groups, both nationally and in each province. Their calculations of the numbers were not far off the correct record of the census, but they felt obliged to produce a higher estimate of around 1.5% by adding a quotient for an assumption that 25% of all ‘real’ Chinese did not identify in the census as such through fear or some other reason.

³²Suryadinata, Arifin and Ananta, Indonesia's Population, 12–14.