Under the Red-and-White Flag: elective Chineseness and socialist realism in Hei Ying's Jakarta

ABSTRACT

Hei Ying’s 1950 novella Under the Red-and-White Flag concerns the Chinese-speaking institutions and community in Jakarta as they respond to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Far from the sultry exoticism of his earlier Nanyang (South Seas) texts, this work turned towards a socialist realism broadly in line with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and prepared Hei Ying for his subsequent career as a “returned Overseas Chinese” (guiqiao) man of letters. Hei Ying's political and literary shift emblematises a larger dynamic: the subordination of some Sinophone Southeast Asian subjects, often voluntarily, to new and starker dichotomies of Chinese political identity, as the foundation of new states in the emerging Cold War foreclosed on flexible Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural and political identities. Sinophone groups like those represented by Hei Ying could and did support Indonesia's National Revolution and striving for prosperity in the name of global solidarity; however, the individual's belonging was for them ethnically defined, and ethnic and political identity were irreducibly linked in works such as this novella. Due to the hardening of political boundaries in the early Cold War, decolonising Asia rendered cultural hybridity increasingly politically suspect as new states defined themselves by autochthony. If the place of ethnic Chinese was to build New China, political duties granted no licence to cultural hybridity, much as they also restricted experimental and effusive veins of literary modernism.

KEYWORDS:

• Hei Ying
• Chinese Indonesians
• Sinophone literature
• Cold War culture
• guiqiao

Introduction

The literary career of Hei Ying (1915–92), rocked and interrupted by the Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, spanned more than half a century and took place in half a dozen cities. Born in Sumatra, he is best remembered today for the short fiction he wrote and published in Shanghai in the 1930s as a very young man (Bevan 2020; Jones 2003; Zhang 1995). A well-known enfant terrible in the Shanghai literary society of his youth, a minor place for him in literary posterity has been established since the 1980s, when scholars of modern literature recovered his oeuvre as part of a renewed interest in Shanghai modernism. They have usually considered him part of the New Perceptionists group that offered “a fast-paced rhythm to render metropolitan life, a relentless pursuit of subjective impressions and of stylistic renovations, an exploration of the subconscious and the unconscious, and the establishment of psychoanalytic fiction in China” (Zhang 1995, 27). Most of the work by Hei Ying that has been anthologised and republished in the last four decades dates from between 1933 and 1937, when he was a young student in Shanghai.

However, as more recent work has reminded us, his Shanghai stories are only one side of his oeuvre, and for that matter, even the works set in Shanghai are informed by his Southeast Asian origins (Jones 2017; Stenberg 2022; Tan 2018). From the beginning of his career, some of his texts also directly addressed Southeast Asia, several of them published in the same years and journals where he published his urbane, cinematic fragments of Shanghai. These Southeast Asian works sketched (predominantly Chinese) life in Southeast Asia of the 1930s and 1940s. While some were geographically specific and realistic, such as “Zai Yaqi de caoyuan shang” (On the Aceh Grasslands), others such as “Nanyang huailianqu” (Elegy for the Southern Isles) partook of an exotic idealised “southern isles” atmosphere (Hei Ying 2021).

Chinese New Perceptionism had largely ended by 1940 with the violent and still mysterious deaths of Liu Na’ou and Hei Ying's friend, Mu Shiying.¹ After his departure from China back to the Indies in 1941, Hei Ying's literary style changed markedly. His notes on his experiences in Japanese prison camps during the war were followed by work in reportage and political commentary in the immediate post-war years. These works have garnered interest almost exclusively in the narrow Indonesia-focused section of the People's Republic of China (PRC) publishing and academe. They also included a sharp awareness of the travails of labouring Chinese in Southeast Asia, an interest influenced by the left-wing writers active in China and continuing a socialist realistic tendency that had already been present in certain earlier stories such as “Guilu” (The Way Back).

Texts written after Hei Ying's departure from Shanghai, or in his decades in the PRC, seem to have elicited limited response at the time and are little read today. When they attract attention, it is as a minor element of a Sinophone Southeast Asian corpus. Thus, the stylistic shift in his writing has not been carefully examined. It represents a significant evolution in his career—a transition from New Perceptionist individualism to socialist realism—and must also be understood as a response to a political choice. This article argues that by the post-war period, the political took pre-eminence over the aesthetic for this author. This evolution, which I take to be a conscious shift in style, occurs simultaneously with the elimination of space for Sinophone Southeast Asian identarian hybridity or ambivalence as the definitions of nation-states (both Chinese and Southeast Asian) hardened. The alignment of much of Sinophone Southeast Asia with the new PRC coincided with the narrowing of space for literary experimentalism on the Chinese left; the somewhat ungoverned creativity of both eclectic Shanghai modernism and Sino-Southeast Asian hybridity were reined it at the same time.²

Hei Ying and lost modernisms

Returning to Indonesia in 1941, Hei Ying produced only journalistic work and no fiction until stories such as “Shidai de gandong” (Sentiments of the Era) in 1947 (Wu 2001; Zhang 2014, 2). Hongbai qixia (Under the Red-and-White Flag) (Hei Ying 1950), though not long enough to constitute a full novel, was the longest fictional narrative that Hei Ying had produced up to that point and his first work of fiction to be published as a standalone work. The book, although “a work of fiction, not a history” (122) is a scarcely veiled report of communal struggles in Jakarta in the new Indonesian republic, revolving around a Chinese language Jakarta newspaper office in 1949 and 1950. The narrative “of a very recent period” (122) begins on the day that sovereignty was transferred from the Netherlands to the United States of Indonesia (27 December 1949) and ends a few months later, on 1 May 1950, Labor Day, an important holiday for Chinese leftists in general and the new PRC in particular. There is only a brief interval between the date on which the narrative concludes (May 1950) and the volume's publication (December 1950). This, in combination with a certain looseness of plotting, suggests that the book's immediate purpose was to sketch revolutionary activities among Chinese people in Indonesia for a contemporary transnational Sinophone readership; posterity was likely at most an afterthought.

Everything suggests that the story draws heavily on of Hei Ying's own experiences in newspaper offices, with the Qiaosheng ribao (Daily Voice of the Overseas Chinese) of the novella representing Shenghuo bao (Seng Hwo Pao, Life Daily), a newspaper supported by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was founded in 1945 (Seng 2020).³ The self-conscious literary flourishes of Hei Ying's New Perceptionist style phase are completely absent, and the novella's main value is as a report from a moment in communal history. As such, it integrates the Indonesian Chinese community into a narrative of general Overseas Chinese struggles and enthusiasm for the PRC, offered to readers in Hong Kong (where it was published), diaspora and the PRC.

Under the Red-and-White Flag, published in December 1950 in Hong Kong and not to my knowledge reissued or included in any collection since, proclaimed Hei Ying's fully-fledged allegiance to the nascent PRC, a position from which he never subsequently deviated. It is not Hei Ying's structurally most assured work, and the many characters and multiple flashbacks seem to represent an effort to create a panorama but also suggest rapid drafting. A slight incoherence seems to be the result of an attempt to pack too many disparate characters and backstories into a book of modest length. Reception of this work in the PRC—and, perhaps paradoxically, of his whole post-war, PRC-oriented oeuvre—has been approving but unremarkable. Overviews of Hei Ying's oeuvre have been content to regard the novella as “describing Chinese Indonesian society's welcoming of the motherland's new life and their intense struggle with Chiang Kai-shekists abroad” (Yang 2003, 45). PRC perspectives account for the shift in Hei Ying's writing style by attributing it to an increase in his “patriotic spirit” and characterise the text as a testimonial to the wide support “[Indonesian] Chinese gave to the national liberation struggle” of the Indonesian revolution (Zhang 2014, 39). Consequently, they consider the novella evidence of Hei Ying “actively participating” in the Indonesian revolution, “using his pen as a weapon,” and of his themes “reflecting Indonesian nation building” (Li 1997, 20).⁴ That kind of reading is valid but limited.

Under the Red-and-White Flag's treatment of political loyalty is based on an unchallenged view of Chinese identity as permanent and fixed, and fully transferable across political, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic spheres. In retrospect, the predominance of the PRC (over the Republic of China [ROC]) and its heavy control of cultural production too easily obscures how much commitment to the CCP of many Southeast Asian Chinese (especially those educated in Mandarin) was an elective response to the promise of New China and its account of the role of the arts. In fact, the interest in Indonesia as a nation is in this novella basically limited to its status as an assumed emerging ally of the PRC. Little nuance is allowed the Jakartan Chinese, who are depicted fairly categorically as friendly and honourable (CCP-supporting) or nefarious and sneaky (KMT-supporting). They are situated implicitly but thoroughly outside the new Indonesian polity on the basis of a racial logic.

By the end of the war, Hei Ying had fully subordinated aesthetic individuality to political necessity. His work from this period is best understood as a record, still valuable today, of the intellectual life of Chinese Indonesia as the post-war order took shape. Simply considering the text's “patriotism,” as PRC summaries tend to do, does not offer a sufficient description of the turn in Hei Ying's career because it does not do justice to Hei Ying's agency and the political commitments he undertook. For Chinese Southeast Asians, identity became troublingly elective, but mutually exclusive: there were not only the emerging options to identify with the new republics of Southeast Asia, but there was also a choice of which political China to identify with.

There is a risk in projecting contemporary assumptions in reading works of the mid-twentieth century. The current era's (especially anglophone multiculturalist academia's) eagerness to model diaspora in terms of hybridity should not obscure the circumstance that much of the Sinophone literary world in the period was characterised by long-distance patriotism energised by the promise of a new, juster and more powerful China. In Sinophone Indonesia, this nationalism did not emerge in opposition to hybridity, which is rarely acknowledged in Sinophone texts of the period, and when appearing is seldom treated as a positive feature. For the milieu around Sinophone leftists, embracing Chinese nationalism represents an orthodox political choice to subordinate the ethnic to the national and the national to the political (much as the PRC would soon be subordinating regional cultures and languages to a national mission).

Hei Ying's pre-1941 works suggest one of the many lost modernisms of China. A recent book about Hei Ying's friend Mu Shiying aptly called him “China's Lost Modernist” (Field 2014), but there is more than one way to lose a modernist (if we take modernism to include its experimental function). If Shen Congwen was lost to political prudence, Eileen Chang dimmed by exile and Cold War politics and Mu Shiying consigned to death and a canon of political forgetfulness, the literary world “lost” Hei Ying's modernism to the more restricted literary scope of early PRC ethno-nationalism. Like many others, he believed the CCP represented Chinese people's best chance at equality and prosperity and that the arts consequently had to be subservient to the political needs of the new PRC. Socialist realism was not the only stylistic avenue that the PRC could have embraced; however, even before 1949, it seems that the urgency and trauma of war foreclosed any options such as New Perceptionism in the PRC. Thus, in this novella, gone are the oneiric atmosphere, eroticism, sometimes squalid cosmopolitanism, cinematic eye, urban elan and flâneur, and what is ushered in are the good and serious people—realistic and imperfect but committed to a greater, collective cause. They are essentially similar types to those who populate, five years later, “Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqing ren” (A Young Man Comes to the Organizational Department) (Wang 1981), to name only one Red classic of the 1950s.

Gone, too, is the central and charismatic individual at the heart of Hei Ying's earlier fiction. While the oeuvre of his Shanghai years was dominated by a strong protagonist's plans, thoughts and (often libidinous) desires, Under the Red-and-White Flag instead offers the group portrait, a microcosm of the hope of New China, at the very cusp of becoming, and reflected in the energies of a passionate diaspora. These New Chinese people are living far from their motherland, due to historical processes that are implicitly or explicitly humiliating or tragic; Chineseness abroad is, it sometimes seems to be suggested, a deviation from nature. “Return” to China in such a fictional world, or such a community moment, constitutes rectification of historical ills and an end to cultural wandering, to the alleged “rootlessness” often invoked in nationalist texts about diaspora.⁵ Although beyond the scope of this essay, there are many parallels with the writing of the Malay peninsula, where writers were similarly inclined to see themselves as uprooted or wandering and consequently tended toward cultural nationalism until the late 1950s (Wong 2002, 52). Hei Ying's early stage of cosmopolitan experimentalism is less typical than the leftist cultural nationalism he would evolve.

Running Chinese ethnicity up the (five-star red) flag

Under the Red-and-White Flag, although conventionally linear in its framing, includes many flashbacks leading the reader back into the biography of certain characters and elucidate earlier major events in the communal life of the Jakarta Chinese, such as the central newspaper's foundation. The book offers more of a snapshot than a narrative arc: a panoramic portrait of Chinese Indonesians in the progressive and patriotic mode.⁶ Of this Hei Ying was fully aware, having decided to make an effort to appeal to a broader readership by his accessible style. His intent as described in the postface was to provide:

a cross-section of one era, and so the story has no in-depth development, which means the structure isn't very tight; the characters being rather many, there can be no striking character sketches, and these perhaps are the weaknesses of this book. (Hei Ying 1950, 123)

Hei Ying was living and worked in the community as he wrote the novella. The immediate post-war Chinese society in Jakarta was politically fragmented, which was the case throughout Chinese communities in Southeast Asia (Seng 2020). As the devastating Chinese Civil War continued to rage, the fragile political alliances of the war years broke apart, and the China-born, Chinese-speaking elements of the Jakarta community split along KMT/CCP lines.⁷

Thus, the novella was set at the beginning of a period during which:

competition between the Chinese Communist and Nationalist Parties was carried on more openly and extensively among the Chinese in Indonesia than within Mainland China or Taiwan. The rivalry between the Red, or the pro-Beijing bloc, and the Blue, or the pro-Taipei bloc, permeated what had long been regarded as “the three pillars” of overseas Chinese societies: civic associations, Chinese-language newspapers, and Chinese-medium schools. (Zhou 2019, 8)

Despite the novella's title, Hei Ying's concern in Under the Red-and-White Flag is not principally with the future of Indonesia, or of the vast majority of ethnic Chinese who would stay in the archipelago. His narrative is focused on the conflict between local KMT and CCP factions, unsubtly distinguished as patriotic, progressive CCP sympathisers or as devious, unpatriotic and sometimes outright collaborationist KMT henchmen. Thus, polarised political realism replaced the lush and sensual tropics of his 1930s stories.

The title's evocation of the Indonesian flag creates the expectation that the text addresses national identities, and these expectations are fulfilled in the opening pages, although the focus is on a different flag: that of the PRC. The process to obtain recognition of the PRC by Indonesia progresses throughout the novella and seems intended to represent a turning point for local Indonesian respect for the community, just as the foundation of the PRC is represented as marking a new beginning for Chinese self-esteem and prestige abroad. The question of the treatment of the PRC flag in Jakarta, the capital of another newly founded republic, is interpreted as crucial to giving the country international standing, due especially from the anti-imperialist fraternity of decolonising states in Southeast Asia. The first chapter, entitled “Salute!—Our Five-Star Flag,” begins:

December 27 1949, early in the morning, in Jakarta, the capital of the United States of Indonesia.⁸ Every home flies the red-and-white-flag, in the great streets and the little alleys, it flutters in the wind, celebrating the birth of the United States of Indonesia. All those who live within the territory of Indonesia know that the red-and-white flag is Indonesia's flag. Leaving aside Indonesians, all the foreign nationals fly the flag of their own country to the left of the red of their own country—e.g., the Dutch tricolour, the British Union Jack, the American Stars and Stripes … Only the Chinese, most numerous among the foreigners in Indonesia, largely fly only the red-and-white flag, leaving the other flagpole empty. (Hei Ying 1950, 1)⁹

Thus, the narrative starts with Chinese Jakartans ashamed or worried about the PRC's new national symbols and only willing to hang the red-and-white flag. Though afraid of retribution from the KMT if they choose to fly the new flag, they are unwilling to fly the ROC flag either. The result is humiliation for the Chinese community, since other foreign nationals living in Jakarta can fly their flags and proclaim their national affiliation. This shame (due to the sense that the “true” flag of Chinese identity is prohibited due to political pressure) aggravates the sense of rootlessness and exile that the characters feel far from China.¹⁰

Exclusion from the family of nations is an aspect of victimhood, for which—according to Hei Ying and his sympathetic characters—the KMT are squarely to blame. At the time that the story takes place, KMT strongmen are apparently still able to manipulate the Indonesian authorities into intimidating progressive Chinese (i.e. all the sympathetic characters) without even leaving the security of their private cars:

At around nine in the morning, a jeep arrived, carrying four or five armed Indonesian policemen, stopping in front of the entrance to the Daily Voice of the Overseas Chinese offices. Behind them came a pig-liver coloured private car, which stopped not far behind. The policemen in the jeep jumped out one after the other, and with rifles at the ready entered the offices. The leader of the group furiously demanded to see the person in charge. (Hei Ying 1950, 6)

Historical accounts from the period confirm that the raising of the new PRC flag represented a formative moment for Chinese communities around the archipelago,¹¹ and that there were numerous conflicts surrounding it. In the early Cold War, the showing of flags was a shibboleth for members of the Chinese community. One American visitor to Jakarta in the early 1950s noted:

The casual observer—and almost everyone who is not Chinese must be counted as casual—can gauge this sentiment only by outward manifestations such as which flag, the Communist or Nationalist, is flown on holidays, or what numbers of people go to what meetings. The experience of this casual observer in Indonesia in 1953 led to the belief that every Chinese shop owned three flags—the Communist, the Nationalist and the Indonesian—and that the owner flew the one that seemed most appropriate for the occasion. (Mallory 1956, 269)

Mallory may have been exaggerating the political pliability of the Jakarta Chinese, but his account corroborates Hei Ying's account of the symbolic importance of the new flag for Chinese communities.¹²

In Under the Red-and-White Flag, the vast majority of ethnic Chinese in Jakarta are represented as patriots eager to honour the new PRC flag, and groups of young men come unbidden to salute the new flag when it is hoisted at the newspaper office. As is usually the case with pro-CCP narratives, non-supporters are represented as a tiny, deviant minority in the hands of sinister foreign forces. With this scene around the Chinese flags as the initial and emblematic conflict, the rest of the novel is set up as a series of tests and travails for progressive Chinese people as they overcome KMT influence and take their rightful place, in the first instance, among the nations present in Jakarta. These efforts in diaspora both emblematise and contribute to the recognition of the PRC in the world.

Ending experiments: turns in identity and culture at the beginning of the Cold War

The plot follows preparations for the Lunar New Year festivities, the activities of progressive (or “patriotic”) theatrical, cultural, sporting and musical organisations, and touches on other questions such as the exploitation of women. Factional matters are recounted in considerable detail: altercations between KMT and CCP groups or attacks in school newspapers for flying the wrong flag. After the Lunar New Year, a petition for Indonesia to recognise the PRC is circulated, and in time the success of this petition (when relations are established, on April 13) is celebrated. Progressive movements are revitalised, and the pernicious forces of the KMT are vanquished.

At times, morality rather than politics is the immediate focus, as for instance in the episode related by one member of the women's association of a young pregnant woman's suicide when abandoned by her lover; this too is ultimately to be read as a testimony of the bitterness of KMT times and a promise that such abuses are soon to become of a thing of the past. Healthier, more moral and prosperous lives are foreshadowed. The exclusive focus on the Chinese people of Jakarta—especially when one remembers the eclectic racial mix of Hei Ying's Shanghai fiction—is not only noticeable but perhaps key to the political message. Ethnicity's tie to Chinese nationhood is a core and unquestioned tenet.

It can remain so because many troubling figures are simplified or erased. As readers move through Under the Red-and-White Flag's narrative, they may be forgiven for wondering: where is the majority population of Jakarta: the local Betawi and other indigenous Indonesians? Where even are the majority of Jakarta Chinese, who would not at that time have spoken Mandarin or, very often, any kind of Chinese? With the novella's focus squarely on Chinese-speakers, our sympathies are enlisted solely for their hopes and sorrows. Other communities are left on the margins of the story. The purpose of the novel, Hei Ying wrote in a postface, is to chronicle “not the struggle of the Indonesian people, but that between the progressive and regressive overseas Chinese” (Hei Ying 1950, 122).

Even in his earlier phase, Hei Ying's fiction had not shown much interest in manifestations of the cultural hybridity that are so often (and for legitimate reasons) associated with the Chinese of Southeast Asia. His writings as a Chinese teenager of colonial origin navigating Shanghai remain poignant explorations of a committed nationalism approached from an outsider perspective, committed by virtue of his consanguinity. His characters in Under the Red-and-White Flag are largely China-born (in the Indonesian parlance of the day, “totok”) and, constituting the workforce of Chinese schools and newspapers, they are also educated and literate in Chinese (there is thus also a submerged class dynamic to the novel, with the Chinese characters more literate and better off than the general population or than the acculturated Peranakan). Little space is granted the Peranakan culture that Hei Ying must have daily encountered and known reasonably well, not only as a major part of Chinese culture and community in Jakarta but also from his north Sumatran hometown of Medan.

As occurs so often when it comes to matters of cultural identity, in Under the Red-and-White Flag, it is public display—a Chinese festival—that elicits direct commentary on the nature and proper expression of Chineseness:

Finally it was New Year according to the old calendar, or, as per the regulations of the [PRC] Central People's Government, what is to be called the Spring Festival. The ethnic Chinese [qiaobao] of Java are very conservative when it comes to Chinese customs, especially those who are born abroad [i.e. on Java], whether male or female, young or old. “Overseas” [qiao] Chinese refers to the Chinese [Zhongguoren] who are born and grow up locally, whose ancestors came from China, and who have not been back to China for a generation, or two generations, so most of their descendants don't really know anything anymore about their ancestors in China, they can't even say anything much in Chinese, and use local Indonesian as their language of general use. These Overseas Chinese, although some of them are Europeanised and some are Indonesianised, will always admit that they are Chinese, and they set great store by the customs and habits of the motherland. (Hei Ying 1950, 97)

Hei Ying's characterisation of the group and choice of terms is telling. The reference to ethnic Chinese as “people from China” (Zhongguoren) despite their place of birth, and despite the emergence of an alternative in the form of the Indonesian state, shows that for him in this work there is a direct and uncomplicated equivalence between ethnic and political identity. This political identity overrides what is modelled as the linguistic deficiency of the Peranakan's general inability to speak Chinese. His approval of Peranakan maintenance of Chinese customs, which is highlighted in the subsequent sentences, is likewise linked to his understanding of patriotism, though their way of doing it requires, in the narrator-author's view, rectification by means the PRC's newly constituted central authority.

Although the “foreignization” of Chinese people is represented as something defective and regrettable—part of the long damage of colonialism—the imputed patriotism of the population, which makes no distinction between cultural, ethnic or political identity, is typical of the long-distance nationalism of both KMT and CCP publications in the period. As always, there is a largely invisible linguistic skew: writings in archipelagic or European languages are more interested in hybrid possibilities of cultural identity and non-Chinese political identities than writings in Chinese.¹³ The culture of the Peranakan Chinese is in this passage treated lightly, with a kind of sympathetic condescension; however, Hei Ying's attitude is a harbinger of the kind of polarity that the Cold War and New Order would force upon Indonesian Chinese, with identities trimmed and purified to meet state-defined ethnic boundaries.

Unlike his contemporaries in China, Hei Ying at least to a degree had a choice in the matter of his political affiliation (and, therefore, of the aesthetics of his fiction). On the one hand, he could choose between KMT and PRC. Also, for someone born in Sumatra and living in Java, there might have been at least theoretically an opportunity to embrace Southeast Asian decolonisation and identify with the Indonesian republic. Some Chinese Indonesians adopted this option: both assimilationist and integrationist Chinese voices were published in Indonesian language political journalism of this period. These are people we could consider elective Indonesians, having explicitly identified themselves with the new Indonesian republic. However, writing in Chinese seldom entertains such a possibility. Hei Ying (and his colleagues in Shenghuo bao) regarded the new Indonesia not as a country to which they might eventually belong, but as an ally in a global confrontation with Euro-American imperialism known now to us as the early Cold War.

As the 1950s progressed, the alliance narrative, too, would come under pressure. Under the Red-and-White Flag encapsulated a moment of optimism before the nationalistic policies of Sukarno were established, especially Presidential Regulation No. 10 of 1959 (better known as PP10), which in 1958 prohibited business by foreign nationals in rural areas and resulted in a Chinese exodus to urban areas and quite often back to the PRC (Somers 1964, 24–35). Such discrimination soured the hopes many Chinese in Indonesia had that the new Indonesian nationalism would prove benign or inclusive, and shaped an understanding that Chinese ethnicity and Indonesian identity were incompatible—an ethnic ideology that would reach its most extreme expression in the Suharto era's systematic discrimination and sometimes ethnically-inflected atrocities.

The “Spring Festival” passage also clarifies that the novella's expected readership could not have been primarily an Indonesian Chinese population, who would require no explanation of their own customs.¹⁴ With the place of publication being Hong Kong rather than Jakarta, it is reasonable to assume that the novel was substantially directed outwards to a broader Sinophone readership in colonial sites not only in Hong Kong but also in Malaya, welcoming the promise of the new ethno-nation to integrate all the scattered Chinese.¹⁵ Under the Red-and-White Flag provides an optimistic view of how Sino-Indonesian relations could have developed—more hopeful than history would bear out, whether as concerns the fate of the Jakarta Chinese who remained or of those who “returned.”

Chinese Indonesians had first been made self-conscious about the hybridity of local culture during the resinification projects of the early twentieth century. Then, as the political boundaries of the Cold War became increasingly starkly delineated, with the closer cleaving of new nation-states to ethnicity and narratives of indigeneity, Indonesian Chinese were forced to choose political sides and new nationalities. That process could be peaceful and amicable, as Hei Ying or other Sinophone leftists such as Ba Ren and Hu Yuzhi imagined it, since both people were, according to them, on the same side of a global struggle. But strong ethnonational boundaries could have violent and traumatic consequences later on, as was the case in the mid to late 1960s when both China in the Cultural Revolution and Suharto's Indonesia became deeply suspicious of transnational connections and hybrid cultures.

It is worth considering Hei Ying's turn towards socialist realism as it compares to the work of Ba Ren, a long-time committed socialist realist and CCP party member. Both were Sinophone intellectuals exhorting Indonesian and Chinese groups to fight against imperialism and colonialism in the later 1940s and early 1950s. However, while Ba Ren's works and life have a missionary quality—bringing proper Chineseness and politics to communities at risk of what he perceived as deficiencies in both—Hei Ying's oeuvre partook of the mid-century urgency of ethnic Chinese born outside China to find a place of belonging, to be recognised as belonging to a nation that would recognise them. With decolonisation in Southeast Asia still incomplete and with the place of Chinese people within these new nationalisms contested and precarious, the establishment of the PRC promised not only new hope for a Chinese civilisation in crisis throughout the first half of the twentieth century but also safety and belonging for Chinese speakers who could not be certain about what independent Southeast Asia had in store for them even if any anxiety was stifled by the categorical optimism of early Cold War Asian leftism.

Conclusion

Hei Ying penned the novella Under the Red-and-White Flag in much the same spirit as his contemporaries in the PRC wrote, namely “in the service of socialism as perceived by the writer at the time” (King 2013, 5). The author's themes and characters turned towards a socialist realism broadly in line with the policies of the CCP and prepared him for his subsequent career as a “returned Overseas Chinese” (guiqiao).¹⁶ Sukarno's government would continue to permit writing in Chinese, but it was the Sinophone journalists, educators and students who were particularly likely to “return” to the PRC.¹⁷ The pro-Taipei newspapers were forced to close in 1958, and the pro-Beijing ones ran only intermittently between 1960 and their closure in 1965 (Suryadinata 1978, 139–140). In a sense, leftist Chinese cultural activity was a victim of its own success, for in suggesting that return was a patriotic duty, it not only gutted the Sinophone communities in Indonesia of its most active spirits and promising minds but also potentially contributed to the fateful conflation in Indonesian governmental and military circles between Chinese Indonesians and Communism. As a sign of Hei Ying's ardent turn towards the PRC, Under the Red-and-White Flag signals the line that was about to be drawn underneath Chinese language writing in Indonesia; literary and journalistic writing in Chinese would decline for a decade (before being for all intents and purposes banned under Suharto). Hei Ying's shift can also emblematise a larger dynamic: the submission of some Sinophone Southeast Asian subjects, often voluntarily, to the stark dichotomies of Chinese political identity. This process, which in Southeast Asia was not effected by means of compulsion, became unavoidable for guiqiao, as Hei Ying would become not long after writing Under the Red-and-White Flag.

Chinese communities in Southeast Asia were in the colonial period famously and productively acculturated, with the Peranakan communities of Indonesia being an important example. The foundation of the new states in the emerging Cold War (PRC, Indonesia, the ROC in its new iteration in Taiwan, later Malaysia and Singapore) narrowed and in Indonesia foreclosed on flexible Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural and, ultimately, political identities. Sinophone groups like those represented by Hei Ying certainly did support the Indonesian republic in the name of a world revolution and resistance to imperialism, but for most Chinese readers of this period the individual's national identity was ethnically defined, and ethnic Chinese were irreducibly politically Chinese. In Sinophone texts today, the emergence of multiculturalist and pluralist views of Indonesia continues to be in tension with a strong tendency of the Sinophone minority to identify itself as patriotic vis-à-vis the PRC (with the viability of an ROC imaginary dwindling almost to the vanishing point as Taiwan reorients itself).

Hei Ying's turn means that his artistic and personal choices resolved along strict lines the new Chinese party-state would lay down for both politics and aesthetics. Despite the novella's title, Hei Ying did not expect his characters to live permanently under the red-and-white flag of Indonesia—the flag is intended as friendly but temporary. Hei Ying notes in his postface that it also carried anti-imperialist resonance, a red-and-white banner having already been flown by Diponegoro in the Java Wars (1825–30) against Dutch domination (Hei Ying 1950, 122). With the retreat of imperialism and promise of a shining new future, the expectation was that patriotic Chinese would return “home,” as he did himself. Ironically, the hardening of political boundaries in Asia's decolonising Cold War, meant that cultural hybridity became increasingly politically suspect as new states defined themselves around autochthony in various modern guises.

The articles in this issue offer reconsiderations of the dichotomy of hybridity and nationalism. Hei Ying's oeuvre is available to be read in terms of that dichotomy—the diasporan's turning away from his Sumatran roots to identify with China politically—and it is a legitimate and useful reading of this novella. But hybridity is a description of culture, while nationalism demands political belonging. While the former, at least in an individual's formative stage, is largely involuntary, the latter is far more conscious and deliberate, especially since three states (the PRC, ROC, Indonesian republic) were, in principle, available; since the second half of the twentieth century, at least, the political has also subordinated the cultural. Once Hei Ying had decided that the place of ethnic Chinese was to build New China, the political imperatives precluded cultural hybridity much as they placed a term to his experiments in literary modernism. In other words, once the personal (the artistic, the mixed, the individual, the uncertain) had been subordinated to the political, the dichotomy was resolved, at the expense of both literary modernism and Sino-Southeast Asian identarian flexibility.

Special terms

Table

Ba Ren	巴人
Bianzhe de hua	編者的話
Chidao chubanshe	赤道出版社
Chidao wenyi congshu	赤道文藝叢書
Guilu	歸路
guiqiao	歸僑
Han Meng	韩萌
Hei Ying	黑嬰
Hongbai qixia	紅白旗下
Hu Yuzhi	胡愈之
Lin Cantian	林參天
Liu Na’ou	劉吶鷗
Mu Shiying	穆時英
Nanyang huailianqu	南島懷戀曲
Nongyan	濃烟
qiao	僑
qiaobao	僑胞
Qiaosheng ribao	僑聲日報
Shalihong	沙里洪
Shen Congwen	沈從文
Shenghuo bao	生活報
Shidai de gandong	時代的感動
Soeto Meisen	司徒眉生
Xin ganjue pai	新感覺派
Zai Yaqi de caoyuan shang	在亞齊的草原上
Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqing ren	組織部新來的年輕人

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Bonnie S. McDougall for comments on an early draft, and Rachel Stenberg for proofreading. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors, as well as the participants and audience at the “Reassessing Chinese Diaspora from the South: History, Culture and Narrative” online symposium (15 April 2021; Australian National University), for their valuable feedback on earlier versions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Research Award.

Notes on contributors

Josh Stenberg

Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display and Liyuanxi—Chinese “Pear Garden” Theatre as well as the editor of Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance.

Notes

1 I follow Zhang Yingjin (1995, 11) and Christopher Rosenmeier (2018) in translating the name of this group, Xin ganjue pai, as New Perceptionists rather than the more common New Sensationists or New Sensationalists. This choice is due to what I regard as the infelicitous echo of “sensation” in the sense of “object of great excitement” and even worse, “sensationalism,” with its aura of cheap journalism. At the same time I acknowledge that the core term, ganjue, is closer to “feeling” than to “perception,” and that the latter term in “perceptionists” should be understood in the meaning of “sense perception.” I note that some Anglophone scholarship of the Japanese group (shin kankaku ha) which used the same sinographs and preceded and to some extent inspired the Chinese New Perceptionists has made the same choice. (For an overview of the Chinese group, see Rosenmeier 2018).

2 I draw some inspiration here from Tom Hoogervorst (2021)’s work on Sino-Malay writing, especially the idea of the “ungoverned” nature of expression. It seems to me that some of the free-wheeling features he documents in the Sino-Malay press provide analogies to think through the relative lack of control over Sinophone Southeast Asian letters before the emergence of strong Chinese governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait post-1949, as well as the limited capacity of at least some independent Southeast Asian governments to monitor or suppress Sinophone literary expression, even if the “ungoverned” aspect is in this case not linguistic.

3 A recent biography of Soeto Meisen (Situ Meisheng) suggested that Hei Ying drew closely on events that had occurred to Soeto, then working at Xinbao (Yuan 2005, 23). The “pen wars” of the period between KMT- and CCP- supporting papers in Indonesia, as elsewhere in diaspora, were intense.

4 Although not a focus of the present analysis, an interpretation that has as its basic purpose an identification of cross-ethnic solidarity is feasible, such as Ba Ren was attempting for Sumatra a little earlier with his drama script Wuzu miao and other related texts (Stenberg 2019; Zhou 2019). With leftist Sino-Indonesian authors such as Hei Ying or Shalihong, the internationalist analysis is less prominent than it is with those directly propounding CCP literary theory, such as Ba Ren, for whom a central purpose of Chinese cultural activity in the emerging Indonesian nation was the assertion of interethnic solidarity and identifying Chinese and Indonesians as equal victims of imperialism and foes of fascism.

5 Bonnie McDougall (1980, 20) noted the possible Soviet influence on Mao's attacks on writers deemed too cosmopolitan. Background abroad made overseas Chinese permanently vulnerable to such attacks, echoing the charge of “rootless cosmopolitanism” levelled against Jewish intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Particularly in the allegation that Jews were too engaged with international trends of art and too little-grounded in native soil, these attacks seem reminiscent of the criticisms, and, later, persecutions of guiqiao in the PRC.

6 Newspapers like the one depicted in the novella played an important role in producing propaganda and reporting community events. The novella may prove useful for scholars interested in the Chinese communal activities, for instance in the fostering of community political coherence through cultural and sporting events.

7 Meanwhile, many acculturated Peranakan Chinese Indonesians were hopeful they might find a place in the new Indonesian republic's emerging conceptualisation of citizenship (Heidhues 1988, 128–129).

8 The United States of Indonesia were a federalist state established in 27 December 1949 as a result of the Dutch-Indonesian Round Table Conference. The setup was not popular and all the constituent states were bound into the unitary Republic of Indonesia by August 1950, and the Provisional Constitution with its unitary state was adopted.

9 All translations are my own.

10 There is a certain irony to considering these pressures now, when the reverse has become the case: Taiwanese routinely feel ignored and insulted by the banning of the ROC flag and other national symbols at international events such as the Olympics.

11 For instance, similar events were recorded in the Singkawang Chinese community on the west coast of Borneo (Hui 2011, 33–37).

12 In years to come, the National Day of the PRC (October 1) especially would become an important moment of flag-waving and recruitment to “return” to China. Indeed, in the years following the establishment of the PRC, recruitment increased surrounding periods of intense propaganda, particularly the frenetic events that inevitably climaxed on the first of October with China's National Day. In urban centres, Chinese diplomats encouraged Beijing-oriented nationalism with films, rallies and meetings chaired by returning tourists, while the embassy in Jakarta maintained very close connections with leftist schools (Godley and Coppel 1990, 185).

13 This also remains the case with contemporary Chinese language writing in Indonesia, which is substantially more engaged with the PRC than is Indonesophone writing (Stenberg 2017).

14 Probably for similar reasons, there are few if any Nanyang linguistic features in his text, in notable contrast with, for instance, the writing of Malayan author Lin Cantian his 1936 novel Nongyan (Thick Smoke) (Chan 2022, 31–69).

15 Hopefully future research will discover more about the publishing house Chidao chubanshe (Equator Press) and its publisher Han Meng. As it stands, the publishing project shows once again the intimate connection between the Sinophone writers of Indonesia, Mahua circles, Hong Kong, and the PRC. Han Meng's “Bianzhe de hua” (Words from the Editor) serves (I surmise) as a general preface to the series in which Hei Ying's novel appeared, the Chidao wenyi congshu (Literary Arts of the Equator Book Series) and shows both a commitment to taking Nanyang literature seriously and to inter-ethnic and international leftist solidarity (Han 1950). The press also published an important anthology in 1951 of Malayan literature (Chan 2018, 542), altering at least one story to appeal to a pan-Sinophone audience.

16 Mao, while deriving much of his views on the role of literature in serving the revolution from Lenin, had embraced “proletarian realism” (by then replaced by “socialist realism” in the Soviet Union) in his Yan’an talks (McDougall 1980, 19–25). “Socialist realism” did not become official PRC state policy until 1953, after the Hei Ying novella, when Premier Zhou Enlai retrospectively classed “the dominant ideology in culture” as socialist realism and Zhou Yang hailed Lu Xun as the “great pioneer and representative of socialist realism” (Yang 1996, 90; see also Bichler 1996, 32–35).

17 The revival of Chinese language literature in Indonesia since the late 1990s has, in many ways, been an inspiring affair driven principally by those who feel strongly about literary creation and with no prospects of making a profit. However, it is a limited and aging return, with very serious questions about whether and at what level it will be sustained (Stenberg 2017). C.W. Watson noted that Peranakan Chinese fiction in the socialist realist vein also came, more or less, to an end at this point (Watson 2017).