From Pulau to Pulo: Archipelagic perspectives on Southeast Asian Chinese ethnicity from the Philippines and Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Southeast Asia is an important region for working through questions of Chineseness. It is, however, a notoriously heterogeneous region, and conclusions derived from some parts of it can be of limited applicability elsewhere. This special issue offering empirically-grounded, multi-disciplinary research engages with and expands on existing scholarship on Southeast Asia’s Chinese. By focusing on Indonesia and the Philippines, the articles in this special issue investigate diverse models of being Chinese in Southeast Asia and depart from the familiar paradigms offered by Singapore and Malaysia, where ethnic Chinese populations are in the highest proportions and hold significant political power, and where Anglophone institutions transmute formulations of Chineseness into academic and political discourse. In so doing, we call for recognising diversity within Chinese communities in the region, not only among localised, hybrid expressions of Chineseness, but in the coexistence of both hybridity and persistent identification with Chineseness in multiple forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• Philippines
• ethnic Chinese
• Southeast Asia
• Sinophone studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This special issue builds on work from an International Workshop entitled ‘Towards a New Nanyang Studies: Examinations of Tionghoa and Tsinoy Beyond the “Sinophone”’ held at the University of Kyoto on the 16^th and 17 December 2019. Its contents benefit from the support of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and, for Stenberg’s part in it, the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Award.

2. Wong, ‘Inter-imperial, ecological interpretations of the “Five Coolies”.’

3. Shih, ‘Theory, Asia, and the Sinophone,’ 482.

4. Hau, The Chinese Question; Uytanlet, The Hybrid Tsinoys.

5. Founded in 1970 to advocate for jus soli citizenship, Kaisa promotes the ‘integration of the ethnic Chinese into mainstream Philippine society’ in the belief that ‘[o]ur blood may be Chinese, but our roots grow deep in Filipino soil; our bonds are with the Filipino people.’ Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran, ‘About Kaisa’; See et al. (eds.), Tsinoy, 5.

6. Collas-Monsod, ‘Why Filipinos Distrust China’; Jose, ‘Can we Still Trust America?’

7. Philippine Department of Trade and Industry, ‘Philippines Invites Investments from China’.

8. KMT hegemony in the Philippines is covered in Kung, Diasporic Cold Warriors.

9. Cheng, Discourses of Race, 303.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josh Stenberg

Josh Stenberg is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney and the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (University of Hawaii Press, 2019).

Chien-Wen Kung

Chien-Wen Kung is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore and the author of Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Charlotte Setijadi

Charlotte Setijadi is Assistant Professor of Humanities (Education) at Singapore Management University.