Page 216 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

recently arrived, ‘purely Chinese’ totok Chinese. A more recent distinction is that
between those Chinese who are Indonesian citizens and those who are not. While the
latter distinction has been crucial for both government policy and for Indonesian
Chinese leaders, society at large generally does not use passport identities as markers
of difference. Coppel (1983: 5) therefore includes in his definition of Indonesian
Chinese those ‘who are regarded as Chinese by indigenous Indonesians (at least
in some circumstances) and given special treatment as a consequence’. This definition
thus includes people who regard themselves as Indonesians and have refused to
identify themselves in any sense with ‘Chineseness’, but whose Chinese characteristics
(mostly physical appearance) still allow them to be labelled and treated as ‘Chinese’.
Thus, the borderline between ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’ is not always clear; ‘the
Indonesian Chinese’ are neither an internally homogeneous nor a securely bounded
category of people.
5 Ariel Heryanto (1998b; 1999) has objected to the designation of this event as ‘anti-
Chinese riots’ because it suggests, unfairly in his view, that the violence erupted
spontaneously and that the culprits were ordinary people motivated by racial prejudice.
He wants to emphasize the clear evidence that sections of the military had an active
hand in fuelling the ‘riots’ and uses the term ‘racialized state terrorism’ to describe the
May 1998 violence.
6 Personal email correspondence with Dan Tse, April 1998.
7 I am especially referring here to the ‘News & Politics’ section of the site’s Bulletin
Board. Since the launch of the site in February 1998 this was the most heavily
frequented electronic discussion space on the site, especially at the height of the
Indonesian Chinese crisis and its immediate aftermath. All quotations from the
Bulletin Board in the rest of this chapter are taken from this corner of cyberspace.
8 The word pribumi to refer to indigenous Indonesians was introduced during Suharto’s
New Order era in replacement of the older word asli, which was used in the 1945
constitution. Both words carry the meaning ‘indigenous’, but in contrast to asli,
pribumi does not connote ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’. According to Coppel (1983: 158),
this discursive shift can be read as an attempt to soften the loadedness of the distinction
between ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ in the designation of Indonesians, against
which Chinese have protested. At the same time, however, the government sanctioned
the use of the derogatory word Cina to refer to ‘Chinese’, over and above the word
Tionghoa, which is preferred by the Chinese themselves.
9 Unlike Kwok’s family, who presumably is of totok Chinese background (given that
she refers to Chinese schools and a Chinese-speaking father), my family, who is of
peranakan background, has never been in active pursuit of Chinese cultural heritage.
Even though I grew up in Indonesia in a time when Chinese schools were not banned
yet, I was sent to a Christian school run by Dutch nuns. There were some (wealthy)
pribumi children in this school. According to Coppel (1983: 162), Christian schools
attract a very high proportion of Chinese students and children from wealthy pribumi
families. He comments that in this respect Chinese schools play a role in ‘assimilating
the Chinese into a particular sector of upper and middle-class Indonesian society’.
10 For the theoretical formulation of the economic as determinant in the first, not last,
instance, see Hall (1996b).
11 The Chinese demand to be granted the formal status of Europeans was inspired by the
fact that the Japanese had managed to acquire such a privileged status in 1899.
12 In colonial times all inhabitants of the colony were ‘Dutch subjects’, with no citizen-
ship rights in the modern, nationalist sense of that word.
13 It is of course difficult to acquire ‘objective’ information about the exact damage done
by the riots, but an independent Human Rights Commission in Indonesia has
estimated that the number of victims killed was around 1,200. It should be stressed
that many of these were not Chinese.

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