Page 74 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

More generally, the colonial economy has played a crucial role in producing a
profound and enduring racial bias in socio-economic relations. As Anthony Reid
puts it: ‘Colonial policies encouraged a division of function, a dual economy,
between the “native” majority of peasants, under their own, often anticommercial,
aristocratic-bureaucratic hierarchy, and the commercial sector of Europeans,
Chinese and other minorities’ (1997: 45). The legacy of this dual colonial economy
resonates deep into postcolonial times, as it reinforced the competitive advantage
of Chinese capitalists vis-à-vis indigenous merchants, who lacked the capitalist
know-how, experience and networks that the Chinese had built up over the
decades. To this day, ethnic Chinese throughout South-East Asia have been able
to seize this advantage, an advantage that has been historically inscribed in their
very habitus, cultural orientation and mode of subjectivity. Such conditions are
still a fertile breeding ground for anti-Chinese populist sentiment today, but it is
important to keep in mind that this antagonism has a long and deep-seated history,
going back to colonialism’s divide and rule policies (see further Ang 2001).
The tragic paradox is that the relative economic advantage of the Chinese is
matched by their political powerlessness in the wake of decolonization and the
advent of the postcolonial nation–state. The ideological force of nationalism,
imported from Europe, was a key factor in the anti-colonial struggle of the
Indonesians; indeed, the very creation of the Indonesian nation as an imagined
community was both a precondition and an outcome of the protracted struggle for
independence from the Dutch colonizers (Anderson 1991). In this new imagined
community, the place of the Chinese minority, who during the colonial period
were called ‘foreign Orientals’, was problematic. While anti-colonial Indonesian
nationalism was not in general directed against the Chinese but against foreign
European rule, in the postcolonial period the presence of the Chinese posed a
problem in the process of nation-building. As Daniel Chirot puts it:

the rise of modern nationalism hardened attitudes toward those newly
viewed as outsiders. Entrepreneurial minorities, previously seen as just
one more among many specialized ethnic and religious groups that existed
in most complex, premodern agrarian societies, now became, in the eyes
of the new nationalists, something considerably more threatening.
(1997: 8)

It should be pointed out, however, that the Chinese themselves were not simply
passive pawns in this historical drama. In an ironic twist, nationalist awakening
occurred earlier among the Chinese than among the indigenous Indonesians. But,
as I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4, most overseas Chinese across South-
East Asia and elsewhere rallied behind a Chinese nationalism, one oriented towards
China, the putative homeland, and not the countries in which they reside –
encouraged as such by nationalist activists from China (Williams 1960; Duara
1997). The Chinese revolution of 1911 strongly emboldened Chinese pride
and faith in China’s power to challenge European hegemony. Charles Coppel

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