People of Indonesia - Chinese
Identifying someone in Indonesia as a member of the Chinese (Tionghoa) ethnic group is not an easy matter, because the physical characteristics, languages, names, areas of residence, and lifestyles of Chinese Indonesians are not always distinct from those of the rest of the population. The national census does not record the Chinese as a special group, and there are no simple racial criteria for membership in this group. There are some people who consider themselves Chinese but who, as a result of intermarriage with the local population, are less than one-quarter Chinese in ancestry. On the other hand, there are some people who by ancestry could be considered half-Chinese or more but who regard themselves as fully Indonesian. Furthermore, many people who identify themselves as Chinese Indonesians cannot read or write the Chinese language.
The policy of the Indonesian government by the early 1990s strongly advocated the assimilation of the Chinese population into the communities in which they lived, but the Chinese had a long history of enforced separation from their non-Chinese neighbors. For nearly a century prior to 1919, Chinese were forced to live in separate urban neighborhoods and could travel out of them only with government permits. Most Chinese continued to settle in urban areas of Indonesia even after this “quarter system” was discontinued in 1919. In some areas, such as the city of Pontianak in Kalimantan Barat and Bagansiapiapi in Riau Province, Chinese even came to form a majority of the population. They began to settle in rural areas of Java in the 1920s and 1930s, but in the 1960s the government again prohibited the Chinese from exercising free choice of residence, requiring them to live in cities and towns.
The Chinese who immigrated to Indonesia were not linguistically homogeneous. The dominant languages among these immigrants were Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese. There was great occupational diversity among the Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but Dutch colonial policies channeled them into trade, mining, or skilled artisanship. In the twenty-first century, Chinese continue to dominate the Indonesian economy’s private sector, despite central government policies designed to promote non-Chinese entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, Chinese are not a monolithic group. Not all are rich and urban. They seldom share a common language besides Indonesian or Javanese.
One of the historical distinctions among Indonesian Chinese in the 1960s and 1970s — between the peranakan (localborn Chinese with some Indonesian ancestry) and totok (full-blooded Chinese, usually foreign-born) — has begun to fade as fewer foreign-born Chinese immigrate to Indonesia. Although the distinctiveness and social significance of this division vary considerably from place to place in the archipelago, ties to the Chinese homeland are weaker within the peranakan community, and there is stronger evidence of Indonesian influence. Unlike the more strictly male-dominated totok, peranakan families recognize descent along both female and male lines. Peranakan are more likely to have converted to Christianity (although some became Muslims) and to have assimilated in other ways to the norms of Indonesian culture. They typically speak Bahasa Indonesia as their first language.
The Suharto government’s program of assimilation for the Chinese began to be phased out in 1998. Long-discouraged symbols of Chinese identity such as Chinese-language newspapers, schools, and public rituals, and the use of Chinese names, are no longer subject to strict regulation. During the Suharto years, nearly all Chinese Indonesians obtained Indonesian citizenship, often at high cost and as a result of considerable government pressure.
Popular resentment persisted toward Chinese economic success, however, and nurtured a perception of Chinese complicity in the Suharto regime’s corruption. In May 1998, riots broke out in which hundreds of Chinese stores were burned and Chinese women were raped and murdered. When many Chinese Indonesians fled the violence, the subsequent capital flight resulted in further economic hardship in a country already suffering a financial crisis. By 2005 many had returned, but the economic and social confidence of many Chinese in the country was badly shaken by the experience.
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