7 - Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia after Soeharto

Summary

The notion of “anti-Chinese violence” has become a cliché in writing about Indonesia. Any journalistic account of an outbreak of anti-Chinese violence is likely to have the following ingredients: a rough estimate of the number of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia; a statement that they are disproportionately wealthy; a reference to anti-Chinese prejudice and discrimination (especially under the Soeharto regime); and an assertion that anti-Chinese violence has deep historical roots in Indonesia. Stated in this way, the propositions seem unexceptionable. But the ingredients are frequently distorted and exaggerated to such an extent that they colour the reporting and the understanding of the violence under consideration.

DISTORTIONS AND EXAGGERATIONS OF EARLIER ANTI-CHINESE VIOLENCE

The fact that anti-Chinese prejudice and discrimination has existed in Indonesia and that it has underpinned outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence over a long period is undeniable. This undoubted fact has, however, been distorted into a fantasy approaching Holocaust proportions. Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry for “Chinese Indonesian” (as of 22 June 2007) which speaks of the “slaughter of millions of Chinese Indonesians” in 1965 and of “the two genocidal riots … in 1965 and 1998” (Wikipedia 2007). This absurdity echoes the nonsense in Jack Pizzey's 1988 film Slow Boat from Surabaya in which he says that “hundreds of thousands of [Chinese], perhaps millions, were butchered by Indonesians” in 1965 (Pizzey 1988).

The representation of the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66 as an anti-Chinese genocide has even infected supposedly academic writing. According to the report of the Minority Rights Group on the Southeast Asian Chinese published in 2000:

“There are still no precise figures on the number of Chinese killed, but the figure is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands (Chin 2000, p. 14).”

The author added in an endnote:

“Some commentators put the number of casualties among the Chinese at tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands (Chin 2000, p. 33, endnote 10).”

but he gave no source for either of these estimates, or even a hint that hundreds of thousands of non-Chinese Indonesians were massacred.