10 - Is There a Future for Chinese Indonesians?

Summary

What kind of future can be foreseen in the decades ahead of us, or hoped for, by the Chinese Indonesians (or Sino-Indonesians, as I feel they would be better named, by analogy with terms such as Sino-Thai and Sino-Americans)? Will it be smoother than the bumpy ride they have experienced since 1945, or even more troubled and insecure? Nobody can possibly know, of course; but some guesses may be better than others and it is worth trying to work out which factors are likely to influence the outcome most strongly. Moreover, the task of trying to analyse how far current trends are likely to persist or change in the years ahead (even those rooted far back in the past) is itself a challenging, and at times, controversial, exercise, yet crucial for any serious attempt to think about their future.

For that purpose, my aim here is to start by looking at some of the currently observable trends that are likely to exert an impact on the future course of ethnic relations affecting the situation of the Sino-Indonesians (or SI, as I will refer to them henceforth), then to assess what may be the most probable determinants of any future course of events relevant to that, the least desirable as well as the most; finally to consider what factors are likely to influence pribumi attitudes towards the SI and, conversely, what kinds of responses and attitudes are likely to emerge among the SI themselves.

Before embarking on those substantive issues, however, I must say something about my use of some of the terminologies here and about the basic reasoning that underlies my own approach to this subject. Even the adjective “Chinese” or the term “Sino-Indonesian” can be problematic since in the last resort, it must be a matter of self-identification by the person(s) concerned, as was found by the designers of the 2000 Census in Indonesia when they had to formulate a question about the ethnicity of its respondents for the first time since the 1930 Census. It is not just a matter of one's name or language, or religion, or socio-cultural characteristics — what Geertz usefully called “primordial loyalties” — although these are often used as rough markers for various purposes.