The Other Malaysia

NOTE: In relation to our discussion on the introduction of race based communal politics in the colonial era and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes that served the needs of the Plural economy based on Racialised Capitalism, see my review of the book by Mona Lohanda, The Chinese and the Dutch in Colonial Java, 1890-1942, below:

NOTE again that while colonial capitalism did not arrive with a clear-cut policy of divide and rule in mind, it DID invent and perpetuate these theories of racial differentiation later in an effort to maintain these exploitative modes of colonial rule and exploitation. I will bring the book with me to the lecture next week.

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Book Review

Caught in Dire Straits: The Fate of the Peranakan Chinese of Indonesia

Mona Lohanda, “Growing Pains: The Chinese and the Dutch in Colonial Java, 1890-1942.” Yayasan Cipta Loka Caraka, Jakarta, 2002. (272 pgs, softcover.)

Southeast Asia’s history is fundamentally a history of peoples and migration; and notwithstanding the compartmentalising logic of nation-states and modern nationalism that emerged during and after the colonial era, it has to be noted that the region that later came within the purview of ASEAN was, first and foremost, a shared territory where different cultures and ethnicities met and commingled. Southeast Asia’s history has lately been cast as a patchwork of neatly demarcated political dominions and territorialities, though the earnest historian would remind us that this patch of earth was the corridor that connected Africa, the Arab lands, South Asia and the Far East.

Writing post-colonial Southeast Asian history has been rendered all the more complicated thanks to the overbearing demands and interests of ethno-nationalist politics too. In so many countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, postcolonial historiography has been held hostage to domestic political investment; not least the perceived need to ensure that the writing of history reflects and embodies the ideological worldview of the ruling majoritarian elite. In some cases, such as in Malaysia and Indonesia, this has translated itself into a self-referential historical discourse that reflects the interests of the writers of history themselves, who often tend to come from the majority ethnic-cultural-religious community. Consequently the history that is produced at the hands of such individuals reflects the interests and concerns of themselves more often than not. Not surprising, then, that the history books of Malaysia remain curiously silent about the role played by the non-Malay communities in the development of the country, and turn their back to the pre-Islamic past as well.

There remains much to be researched, discussed and written about the historical role played by the other ethnic and religious communities in Malaysia and the neighbouring countries. And it is with that consideration in mind that we welcome the publication of Mona Lohanda’s ‘Growing Pains: The Chinese and the Dutch in Colonial Java 1890-1942’.

Cosmopolitans caught between frontiers.

Lohanda’s study is primarily a historical one, drawing on historical data gleamed from archives in London, the Hague, Jakarta and China. Read as political history, her work charts the complicated development of Chinese identity and identity politics in the Dutch East Indies and how such a political and politicised identity was developed in the context of an age where Imperialism and contested political interests dominated the arena of international politics. Caught in the middle were those liminal communities that bridged the frontiers of race, ethnicity and culture and whose very cosmopolitanism were both an asset and a liability at times. The Chinese of Southeast Asia were particularly vulnerable to these external variable factors that were constantly determining their fate and the subject-positions they occupied in the colonies then.

Both Chinese and Indian communities had settled in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries and had risen to positions of prominence in many of the countries they had come to regard as their new homelands. In British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, both Indian and Chinese communities had settled and intermarried, creating the hybrid Peranakan communities known for their distinct cosmopolitan outlook and their own unique modes of dress, cuisine, architecture and language, which was both local and global at the same time. Historical records demonstrate the extent to which the Peranakan Chinese and Indians played a visible role in the commerce, politics and culture of the countries they had settled in.

The presence of Chinese migrants and settlers in what would later become the Dutch East Indies goes back to the early 17th century. In 1619 the Chineesche Raad (Chinese Council) was established in Batavia with the election of the first Kapitan Cina (Chinese Headman) to represent the Chinese community living in and around the city. As far as their legal status in the country was concerned, the Dutch authorities regarded the Chinese as “gelijkgesteld met de Inlanders”, or as being equal to the natives; and from 1620 the Chinese were expected to pay the hoofgeld der Chineezen, or capitation tax. (1)

In return for these demands and obligations imposed on them, for much of the 17th and 18th centuries the Chinese in the Indies were allowed to settle and carry out their economic activities as long as they worked within the framework of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) law and complied with the demands of the colonial administration, the chief of which was to help in the opening up of new economic ventures and opportunities in the colony and to contribute to the coffers of the VOC via taxes and revenue-faming.

By 1818 the Chinese in the East Indies were classified as Vreemde Oosterlingen, a legal classification that also applied to Indian and Arabs and which placed them on the same legal status as the native pribumis vis-à-vis the colonial state. The granting of this legal status (albeit ambiguous) afforded the Chinese some room to manoeuvre and allowed them to play a part in the economic development of the colony. The opening up of legalised opium dens proved to be a boon for many of the Chinese officials employed by the VOC, as it gave them ample opportunity to collect revenue and taxes from these institutions, right up to the heyday of the opium trade and opium consumption in the 1986s – 1890s. (2)

Despite this level of legal integration, however, the situation that faced the Chinese in the Dutch East Indies was very different from that which faced the Indians. By the 18th century India had come under the rule of Western colonial powers and after 1857 was administered as a British colony by the British government based in London. China, however, was still very much an independent state, despite the pressures being exerted on it by competing imperial powers including Japan, Britain, America and other Western states. The fate of the Chinese community in the East Indies – be they local-born Peranakan or recent Singkeh migrants from China – was intertwined with the mixed fortunes of China and China’s relations with the Dutch colonial government.

The VOC administration in the East Indies was run according to the logic of colonial governmentality, and it was no surprise that in such a context the main concern of the Dutch company administrators was to identify, police and regulate the lives and identities of their colonised subjects. This was easier done with Indians who were already subjects of another colonial power (Britain), but less clear with the Chinese who were still regarded as free agents with political identities of their own. To this end in 1854, 1892, 1910 and 1911 a number of consular treaties were signed between the colonial government in Batavia and the Chinese government in order to clarify the legal status of the Chinese in the East Indies.

Yet despite the attempts to regulate and normalise the status of the Chinese in the colony, there remained fundamental differences in the outlook of both the Dutch colonial and Chinese governments: The Dutch Citizenship and Residents Regulations of 1910, for instance, took the view that all local-born Chinese were to be regarded as residents of the East Indies and were therefore to be seen as subjects of the government of Holland. This was an understanding of citizenship based on the principle of jus soli. But China took the view that all Chinese remained both culturally Chinese as well as citizens of China wherever they may be, regardless of their place of birth, based on the principle of jus sanguinis. (3)

The notion of belonging and identity being based on blood rather than the circumstances of one’s birth would remain largely unchanged over the decades to come, and was further reinforced with the rise of Sun Yat Sen and the nationalist movement of China that was committed to the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. Later Sun Yat Sen would himself reinforce this idea by developing his own ethno-nationalist ideology based on the concepts of race and nation, or minzu, in the 1920s. Here lay the biggest distinction between the Chinese and Indian settlers and migrants in both British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. While the identity of the latter was not based primarily on the notion of blood-based identity politics and belonging, Chinese identity and the very idea of what constituted ‘Chineseness’ began to take on a more essentialist, as well as exclusive, meaning by the beginning of the 20th century.

While the Indians of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies did not have a motherland to look to for support and succour, the Nanyang Chinese of Southeast Asia were still in a complicated relationship with their ‘home’ country that was both a source of cultural pride yet a political burden. For many of the Peranakan Chinese in Malaya and the East Indies, China played a role in defining who and what they were vis-à-vis the other ethnic and linguistic communities they were living beside with in their newly adopted countries. The Chinese government, cognisant of the strength of this emotional-psychological bond, exploited it to the full in order to draw on the resources of the overseas Chinese to serve its own domestic political ends. As Lohanda (2002) puts it:

“In the face of their ability to turn (these developments) to their own good, the Peranakan Chinese were helpless in evading the Chinese government’s claws. For no matter how much the Peranakans felt discomfort with a pure Chinese environment, they still cherished that sentimental feeling to the land of their cultural roots, China. That China manipulated such feelings and cultural attachment was understandable. In particular, China’s struggle to overthrown Manchu rule and to fight against Western domination depended on the support of its overseas subjects, morally and financially. As Sun Yat Sen admitted: ‘The overseas Chinese are the mother of the revolution’”. (4)

However, it was precisely this intransigent, essentialist view of the overseas Chinese as ‘subjects to the Chinese nation’ that made the political, economic and cultural existence of the Chinese in places like the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya more and more complicated; and which compromised their standing as equal subjects and citizens in the eyes of both the Western colonial authorities and the local-born pribumis of Malaya and the East Indies.

The Tide Turns: The Reinvention of the Chinese as ‘Bloodsuckers of the Javanese’

Notwithstanding their contribution to the development of the Dutch colony and its economy, the Chinese were not allowed to take part in the process of governing the colony itself. It was apparent to all parties concerned that it was the Dutch who were the real rulers of the East Indies, with a handful of local Javanese and other Pribumi elites co-opted into the system once in a while to give some semblance of local political activity and political participation. This hierarchical outlook not only shaped Dutch attitudes towards colonial governance, but also coloured the framework of racialised capitalism and communitarian politics that were being instituted in the colony in the years to come.

The 20th century Dutch ‘ethical policy’ towards the native Indonesians was anticipated by earlier regulations that explicitly forbade the entry of Chinese – both native-born and recent migrants – into the colonial civil service, and legal formulations for such restrictions were made time and again, in 1864, 1871 and 1883. Dutch policy towards the Chinese of the East Indies was therefore predicated on the understanding of racial difference and catered to the development of a plural economic system based on neat distinctions of race that overlapped with specific economic and political roles for the communities.

Cast as ‘industrious’ yet ‘non-native’, the Chinese were utilised by the Dutch to serve the ends of colonial-capitalism, but hardly ever made to feel part of the society of the East Indies, despite the increasingly large number of Peranakan Chinese who were born and growing up there. By the earlier stages of the 19th century the era of the great companies of the East was coming to a close. The fortunes of the Dutch VOC had waned and the administration of the Dutch East Indies slowly passed to the hands of the Dutch government based in the Netherlands; in very much the same way that the administration of British India passed from the English East India Company to the British government following the Indian Revolt of 1857.

In 1848 the Constitution of the Netherlands was reformed to allow for greater control of its colonies abroad, bypassing the powers of the VOC. In the decades that followed the Dutch government paved the way for more direct governance at the local level in the East Indies. Administrative reform in the East Indies meant more decentralisation accompanied by the uniformisation of laws and regulations regarding tax-collection and revenue earnings. As Lohanda (2002) notes, ‘this also led to the abolition of the revenue-faming system (which was a special concern of the Chinese) that applied firstly to the small farms and later to pawnshop and opium farms, to be replaced by government monopolies’.(5)

In 1855 the first steps were made by the Dutch to end the practice of revenue and tax-farming. With the decline in tax farming the role of the Chinese tax farmers and other Chinese officials formerly in the pay of the colonial authorities came into question. ‘Eventually, heated arguments and long debates focussed on the question of whether the institution of Chinese officers should be allowed to continue.’(6) The end of tax and revenue-farming also meant that the issuing of travel permits and passes to the Chinese came to an end, which effectively limited the scope of their local trading activities as well, as the Chinese entrepreneurs needed such travel documents and passes in order to travel across Java and the rest of the Indies.

By the mid-19th century the Dutch colonial authorities were increasingly wary of the role played by the Chinese in the colony. Chinese penetration into areas such as tax-farming, the batik trade, the cultivation of crops like pepper, sugar cane, tobacco and coffee, all contributed to the growing impression that the Chinese were both an asset and a threat to social stability in the Indies. In December 1857 the Dutch Minister of the Colony of East Indies, P. Mijer (1856-1858) went as far as referring to the Chinese entrepreneurs in Java as the “bloedzuigers der Javanen” (‘Bloodsuckers of the Javanese’) (7) and called for limits to be imposed on their economic activities, ostensibly to protect the local Javanese merchant community – while also allowing Dutch entrepreneurs more room to manoeuvre in the colony. Such rhetoric struck a chord with the emerging class of pribumi elites who would later lead the indigenous economic movement that materialised in the form of pribumi companies like the Sarekat Dagang Islam, that was aimed at winning back control of the local Indonesian economy and stopping the advances of Chinese capital in the colony.(8)

Another consequence of the institutional reforms that were introduced to the Dutch East Indies was the emergence of new forms of collective identity politics. As the inhabitants of the East Indies were made to feel themselves distinct from the mother country, a renewed attempt at carving a space for themselves was made by all the communities that lived side-by-side in the cosmopolitan colony. In the urban centres of Java, distinctly European and Eurasian enclaves emerged where local-born Dutch Indos marked out a distinctively hybrid Euro-Asian environment for themselves, complete with housing compounds and estates that resembled the urban landscape of Europe. Schools, hospitals, hotels, shops and other services catering to the Eurasian Indo community soon followed, creating the impression of a ‘piece of transplanted Holland’ in the middle of Indonesia. This trend was reflected by the other communities of the Indies as well, including the natives as well as descendants of other Asian migrant communities such as the Peranakan Chinese, Indians and Arabs who had settled there; each of which formed distinct cultural enclaves of their own. As Lohanda notes, ‘the new self-awareness among the Peranakan Chinese and the indigenous Indonesians equally tended towards exclusivism, as much as the Europeans themselves. After 1900 the late colonial Dutch East Indies became a collection of self-aware population groups, each guided by group-nationalism’.(9)

End of the Peranakan

Lohanda’s work stops at the year 1942, though much of what she has written on has relevance for the development of Indonesia during the anti-colonial struggle during the Second World War and the decades that followed decolonisation. During the 1960s, when the tattered NASAKOM (Nasionalisme-Komunisme-Agama) coalition of Sukarno was falling apart, Indonesia’s military-backed nationalists and Islamists were wont to fall back on the negative stereotypes of the Chinese as the ‘enemy within’ that were developed by the Dutch during the colonial era. The virtual elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was done all the more bloodily thanks to the heated racist rhetoric employed by the nationalists, who claimed that the PKI were fundamentally a Chinese-backed movement with its centre in Peking; and numerous attempts were made to paint the PKI in lurid colours, as a Chinese movement supported by China, with the secret agenda of toppling the Indonesian government and to further China’s interests in the region.

Such anti-Chinese sentiment flares up time and again till today in Indonesia, as witnessed by the anti-Chinese demonstrations and riots that led to the sacking of the Chinese quarter of Glodok in Jakarta during the reformasi months of 1998; when once again the Chinese were cast as the ‘bloodsuckers’ of the nation, eating away at the wealth of the Republic. Sadly, despite the advances made by the Indonesian economy, little has been done to study and counteract such popular prejudice that lives on till now.

Here lies the merit of Lohanda’s important text: By looking back at the role of the Dutch colonial authorities in the process of identity creation and identity politics, she correctly shows that racism and communitarianism are historical processes that involve ideologies and institutions. The construction of the image of the Chinese as ‘foreigners’ in a land they had settled in for hundreds of years was neither natural nor accidental, but rather a sustained project of ‘Othering’ a community with the intention of serving the interests of racialised capitalism and colonialism. The sad irony is that in the countries of Southeast Asia today such racialised discourse has never been effectively rejected or even criticised, but rather have become the norms of politics in the postcolonial era.

In Lohanda’s work it is clear that the real victims of this political process were the Peranakan communities who could have been the bridge between Southeast Asia and East Asia: Many of the Peranakan Chinese of Indonesia cherished their ties to China, which remained in their eyes as the ‘mother country’ and the wellspring of Chinese identity. But being Indonesian-born, they also wanted to present themselves as children of Indonesia who had cast their lot with the local-born natives of the archipelago. As she points out, by the beginning of the 20th century there had developed a local Peranakan Chinese community that was, for all intents and purposes, thoroughly localised and with a strong attachment to the Indies as their home. By then, ‘Peranakan literature flourished in Java; its literary works were written in vernacular Bazaar-Malay. The flourishing Sino-Malay press in the first decade of the twentieth century – the first Sino-Malay newspaper was the Bintang Soerabaia – justified their pioneering contribution to the history of the Indonesian press.’(10)

The Peranakan Chinese of Indonesia, however, suffered from the Dutch policy towards them that was often inconsistent. By the 1920s and 1930s local Peranakan Chinese support for the rising nationalist movement in China had earned them the suspicion of the Dutch colonial authorities, and by the 1930s the colonial Kantoor voor Chineesche Zaken (Colonial Office for Chinese Affairs) had begun to lodge reports about Peranakan Chinese traders collecting money from local Chinese to support the nationalist movement in China.(11) Such activities were often deemed subversive and illegal, and helped only to entrench the growing perception that the Chinese in the East Indies were a community apart, driven by conflicting loyalties.

In time, within the context of rising Indonesian nationalism, the vulnerability of the Peranakan was even stronger. Their participation in the politics of the Indies through the People’s Council or Volksraad illustrated how the Peranakan viewed their status as members of the Dutch East Indies community which often collided with the political interests of the Indonesian nationalist movement’ that would later come to be led and personified by native leaders like Soekarno and Muhammad Hatta.

Overall this reviewer has little to complain about Mona Lohanda’s book, which has to be said is both extremely important and timely. This is one text that deserves to be studied by a broader readership and credit goes to Lohanda for making her research findings accessible to a wider public. The book itself could do with a serious second proof reading however, and the frequency with which one encounters typographical errors does detract from what would otherwise be a pleasurable and informative read. Having said that, these technical shortcomings do not, and should not, deter one from having a serious go at the work. An important book that should be on the bookshelves of every concerned scholar of contemporary Southeast Asia.

Endnotes:

(1) Lohanda, 2002, pg. 42.

(2) Ibid. pg. 41.

(3) Ibid. pg. 79.

(4) Ibid. pg. 125.

(5) Ibid. pg. 35.

(6) Ibid. pg. 35.

(7) Re: “Sedert wanneer is het Gouvernement zoo anti-Chineesch geworden?’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indie, 1857, part 1, pp. 168-171; quoted in Lohanda (2002), pg. 23, fn. 3.

(8) More than half a century later, the same description of the Chinese as ‘bloodsuckers of the Javanese’ would be taken up and used by Abdul Muis, the founder of the Sarekat Dagang Islam that was formed in 1905. During his European tour Abdul Muis spoke of the Chinese as bloodsuckers who had drained the wealth of the nation and who had stood in the way of the economic advancement of the local pribumis. Muis’s comments were later reported by the peranakan Chinese newspaper Sin Po, and the report led to a long polemic that was sustained by both sides for years to come. As the Sarekat Islam grew and spread across Java, its leaders sustained the anti-Chinese rhetoric that had been inspired by P. Mijer’s comments half a century earlier. Sarekat Islam worked to undermine Chinese efforts to dominate key industries such as the Batik trade along the Pesisiran coast that was based in towns like Cirebon, Pekalongan and Semarang. (re: Lohanda, 2002, pp. 89-90.)

(9) Locanda, 2002. pg. 11.

(10) Ibid. pp. 64-65.

(11) Ibid. pg. 57.