Page 73 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

reject the uneasy hierarchy in the arrangement – and it was an unease fed by the
egalitarian structure of feeling I had internalized so thoroughly in the West – and
it made me want to disidentify with the Chinese, even though I know all too well
that it is impossible to homogenize all Chinese-Indonesians and I do understand,
ethnomethodologically, that those living within the arrangement cannot constantly
question the assumptive world they live in: being Chinese in Indonesia does signify,
on the whole, being positioned on the winning side of economic well-being – a
reality one cannot easily extract oneself from.
According to Leo Suryadinata (1998), a Singapore-based expert on the situation
of the Chinese in South-East Asia, ‘Some of Indonesia’s wealthiest citizens are
Chinese, but most Chinese are not rich.’ Indeed, the experiences I have described
above – Kwok’s and my own – cannot really be considered representative, though
they are certainly not untypical. As an urban-based minority, the Chinese are a
major component of the Indonesian middle class. Throughout the country they
have always dominated commercial life and the retail trade. It misses the point here
to suggest, as more Marxist-inclined analysts would do, that the ‘Chinese problem’
in Indonesia is not one of ‘race’, but one of ‘class’. The problem is that in this
context, ‘class’ is lived in the modality of ‘race’: Indonesia is an intensely racialized
social formation, in which the Chinese/pribumi distinction is generally read
in terms of economic advantage/disadvantage. In other words, ‘Chineseness’ in
contemporary Indonesia does not connote primarily cultural identities, but
economic identities. It is this real and perceived economic divide that determines,
in the first instance, the manner in which real and perceived cultural differences are
transformed into social incompatibilities and antagonisms, both ideologically and
in practice. 10
We are dealing with an extremely complex set of historically formed relations
here. Chinese merchants and traders in South-East Asia have often been dubbed
‘the Jews of the Orient’, an antipathetic term of abuse first used by King Vajiravudth
of Thailand in 1920s (Tejapira 1997). This designation refers to the crucial role
the Chinese ‘enterpreneurial minority’ has for centuries played in the commercial
practices throughout the region. In colonial times, the Chinese were brokers
between the European colonizers and the indigenous population, particularly in
the system of tax farming for the collection of state revenues. Revenue farming
brought great wealth to Chinese farmers, but it contributed in the long term to
the hostility towards them because the position of revenue farmer was ‘at the cutting
edge of colonial oppression’ (Cribb 2000: 185). They were the ones who had to
extract tax money (plus some profit) from the natives and thus were perceived as
greedy and exploitative. Thus, in Cribb’s words:

Although differences between Islam and Chinese religious practices, as
well as Chinese cultural chauvinism, may have contributed to the hostility
towards the Chinese, there is no factor as likely to have created an anti-
Chinese racism as Chinese dominance of the revenue farms.
(ibid.: 185–6)

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