Pramoedya Ananta Toer's polemical work protesting discrimination against the Chinese in Indonesia is now available in English. An excerpt from an introductory essay in the book by Max Lane is below.
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EXCERPT from "Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Racialism and Socialism".
In the 1960s, Indonesian politics was characterised by a deep and fundamental battle around the question: what kind of country should independent Indonesia become? Political integration of the Chinese Indonesians was viewed by Toer, and by a large number of Chinese Indonesian leaders, as something that would be achieved by Chinese Indonesians, like all Indonesians, joining the struggle to finishing the Indonesian national revolution and consolidating Indonesian socialism. The largest active Chinese Indonesian organisation during the sixties was BAPERKI (Badan Permusyawaratan Kewarganegaraan
Indonesia – Consultative Body of Indonesian Citizens) which adopted this perspective. It was banned and its leaders also arrested in 1965, at the same time as Toer and hundreds of thousands of others.
Anti-Chinese prejudice generated by bourgeois interests
For Toer, moving in a socialist direction was a crucial part of the solution to discrimination against the Chinese as well as the framework that could facilitate full integration. He repeatedly illustrates how the whole history of discrimination against and oppression of the Chinese has been driven by the dynamics of competition among sections of capital, imperial as well as domestic. The Dutch, he explains, afraid that there were more Chinese active in trade compared to the initial tiny number of Dutch were the first to act against them, even to the extent of carrying out horrific massacres. All the early regulations, taking away Chinese subjects rights to live and work where they wish were instituted by the Dutch.
Evolving in an atmosphere where Dutch policy had ghettoised the, later tensions between Chinese and non-Chinese inhabitants of the ‘Indies” were, argues Toer, initially stimulated by Dutch manipulation and, then further developed as a result of rivalry with non-Chinese aspiring capitalists. He attacks mercilessly the commercial motives of such aspiring business people behind the 1959 regulations against which the book is aimed.
Toer’s point here is that the origins of anti-Chinese race hatred cannot be traced back to any inherent problems between Chinese and non-Chinese workers and peasants, even if, by the 1960s, anti-Chinese racial stereotyping had gained some influence among sections of the masses.
Under the New Order Suharto dictatorship, this dynamic remained, but was given some new twists. First, the relationship between the country’s top capitalists, namely the Suharto family and other military or politician families, foreign business and the largest Chinese Indonesian capitalists was increasingly characterised by partnership rather than rivalry. However, the Chinese cukong businessmen, alongside but often more easily appearing alien than the cronies generally, did emerge as a symbol of the blockage that the huge capital of the crony conglomerates represented to the thousands, even tens of thousands, of aspiring medium and small business people that emerged in Indonesia’s oil revenue fuelled business world.
Thus, as soon as the economy went into severe crisis in 1997, many political figures, many of whom had previously been in partnership with Chinese Indonesian businessmen, started to scapegoat them, often using the issue of capital flight. There was a massive campaign from within the Indonesian political and military elite to blame the Chinese for the economic crisis. Then when the crony conglomerates were dislodged from their position of dictatorial political power in May 1998, there were attempts to revive campaigns to dislodge Chinese Indonesian businesses at all levels. There was one attempt to start such a campaign during the Habibie presidency (1998-99) by Minister for Cooperatives and Small Business, Adi Sasono, when he began promoting the government “cooperatives” as an alternative distribution system. This echoed almost exactly the propaganda that Toer was answering in 1959 and 1960, even the same claim that there was no specific targeting of Chinese.
Even as late as August 2003, there was an attempt to include a reference for preferential treatment to “native business” in a key Economic Recovery Decree being considered by the Peoples Consultative Assembly. Public opposition, generated initially by the democratic agenda advocacy groups, eventually forced the deletion of this reference.
In the post-Suharto period, one result of the long period of partnership between Chinese Indonesian business cronies and the Suharto family and other leading non-Chinese business groups, is that the word cukong, as a symbol of big business wealth and accumulation, has been over-taken by that of kroni itself. Tensions between smaller business and “Chinese” business became increasing conflated with anti-kroni and anti-konglomerat sentiment in general. Of course, when Toer wrote his book the massive business conglomerates built by Soeharto’s family did not exist.
Nation-building, Indonesian socialism and double alienation
The other phenomena which ended in 1965 upon the seizure of power by the Suharto clique and its dictatorship was the central position occupied by the battle over what kind of country Indonesia should become. The violent suppression of the country’s largest political organisations, involving at least 20 million active members, who had been campaigning under the banner of “socialism ala Indonesia”, had “resolved” this issue – at least for the time being. From the point of view of the analysis presented by Toer, this would have also taken away the framework in which a real integration of the Chinese Indonesians could have been achieved.
If there was to be no struggle for a socialist Indonesia but rather simply an Indonesia driven by a “liberal economy’ where self-enrichment by whatever means available was the engine for all economic activity – as it was under Suharto, then there was no possibility of an integration based on joining with under inhabitants of Indonesia in the struggle to build the nation through a collective, conscious socialist effort.
For Toer, Chinese Indonesians were indeed Indonesians, who happened to have their own specific traditions and culture. He saw no reason for them to give up these traditions simply to become Indonesian. He was a nationalist, but not an assimilationist nationalist. For Toer, the Indonesian nation was still being created, as was its culture. In terms of national culture, Toer was – and still is - in fact an internationalist, taking the best, most progressive and democratic ideas from wherever they had originated – as is the essence of the second book, Child of All Nations, of his series of four books on the on the awakening of Indonesia, beginning with This Earth of Mankind. For Toer, Indonesia was ‘the earth of mankind’ not of some single race, and its ideas were to be drawn from the struggles of all nations. There was no Indonesian culture into which the Chinese Indonesians could assimilate. There was rather an Indonesian culture to be created. In this latter struggle, perhaps traditions and cultures might need to be abandoned, but the same applied to other traditions as well, especially that of the Javanese.
Under the Suharto dictatorship, however, Chinese Indonesian’s rights to express their traditions and cultures were suppressed. The Suharto dictatorship brought in policies explicitly banning Chinese traditional cultural practices from occurring in public. Chinese language schools were suppressed as was the use of the Chinese language in the media. The pressure for Chinese Indonesians to change their name to an “Indonesian” name was increased. This pressure had been around before 1965 but had been contained by public statements by President Soekarno who often raised the question – which Toer would have also asked – what is an Indonesian name? In a speech at the main Jakarta sports stadium in 1963 at a rally organised by BAPERKI, Soekarno expressed his view on this issue with the following words.
But my personal feelings, my brothers and sisters, is that I don’t recognise difference in blood. The same for names. For example my own name, Sukarno, is it an original Indonesian name? No! It comes from Sanskrit, “sukarna”. Ah, over there Abdulgani, Arab; yes brother Roeslan has an Arab name. And then there is Pak Ali, his name is mixed. Ali is Arab, Sastramidjaaja is from Sanskrit. … If you want to be an Indonesian, there is no need to change your name. You want to keep Thiam Nio as your name, fine, why not. … Why do people demand that Chinese Indonesians change their name if they want to become a citizen of the republic of Indonesia. … No! This is a private matter. …”
Chinese Indonesians were subject to a double oppression under Suharto. They were banned from freely practicing their traditions while, along with the rest of the mass of the population, they were disenfranchised from meaningful political participation, namely, in the political struggle to shape Indonesian society.