Thammasat University students interested in ASEAN studies, China, economics, political science, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 26 March Zoom webinar on The Elastic Co-Ethnic: Multifaced Southeast Asian Diasporas in Early Reform-Era Shenzhen.
The event, on Tuesday, 26 March at 1pm Bangkok time, is presented by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore.
The TU Library collection includes research about different aspects of the Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9617103166903/WN_8yG7MJ3BTHuKm35zgYymEg#/
The event webpage explains:
About the Seminar
Ethnic Chinese communities outside mainland China played an important role in fueling China’s economic takeoff. Beyond the common narratives about diasporic contribution to China’s marketization, this talk discusses how “diaspora” was deliberately made into an open category by the PRC’s policymakers to maximize capital inflow into the special economic zones, where preferential treatment was given to overseas investors and manufacturers. The strategic slipperiness of the concept blurred the boundary between “domestic” and “foreign”, allowing investors from Southeast Asian countries with complicated political relations with Beijing to enter the mainland under the label of “Chinese overseas”, while allowing the intelligence networks the PRC cultivated in Southeast Asia in the 1950s to be repurposed for commerce. The strategically flexible diaspora thus served as a policy device which opened up the Chinese economy, allowing PRC to transcend beyond the Cold War.
About the Speaker
Dr. Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
TU students may access Dr. Zhou’s book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
According to the publisher’s description:
Migration in the Time of Revolution examines how two of the world’s most populous countries interacted between 1945 and 1967, when the concept of citizenship was contested, political loyalty was in question, identity was fluid, and the boundaries of political mobilization were blurred. Taomo Zhou asks probing questions of this important period in the histories of the People’s Republic of China and Indonesia. What was it like to be a youth in search of an ancestral homeland that one had never set foot in, or an economic refugee whose expertise in private business became undesirable in one’s new home in the socialist state? What ideological beliefs or practical calculations motivated individuals to commit to one particular nationality while forsaking another?
As Zhou demonstrates, the answers to such questions about “ordinary” migrants are crucial to a deeper understanding of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Through newly declassified documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution argues that migration and the political activism of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia were important historical forces in the making of governmental relations between Beijing and Jakarta after World War II. Zhou highlights the agency and autonomy of individuals whose life experiences were shaped by but also helped shape the trajectory of bilateral diplomacy. These ethnic Chinese migrants and settlers were, Zhou contends, not passively acted upon but actively responding to the developing events of the Cold War.
This book bridges the fields of diplomatic history and migration studies by reconstructing the Cold War in Asia as social processes from the ground up.
On the website of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS) or Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank is posted a working paper by Dr. Zhou: Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960-1965
It begins:
From 1960 until 1965, the governments of the People’s Republic of China and the
Republic of Indonesia shared an aspiration to replace the bipolar world structure dominated by Moscow and Washington with a more equitable international order. This convergence of interests enabled the two countries to enjoy a remarkably cordial quasi alliance with one another.
To alleviate the isolation it suffered after the Sino-Soviet split, and the fragmentation of the International Communist Movement, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or the PKI). High-level visits and cultural, educational, and economic exchanges between the nations reached a climax in 1964-1965.
At the same time, the years 1960 and 1965 also marked two large waves of anti-Chinese movements in Indonesia. In 1959-1960, a large-scale anti-Chinese crisis broke out due to Indonesian governmental decrees banning retail trade by “aliens,” which included people of Chinese descent. In the face of this challenging situation, Beijing chose to send out a fleet to bring ethnic Chinese back to China. Then, in 1965, the overseas Chinese suffered from brutal attacks in the aftermath of the abortive coup that took place on 30 September 1965 (hereafter “the Movement”). The generally agreed-upon facts about this highly controversial coup go as follows: Indonesian Army units from the presidential palace guard abducted and later killed six senior anti-Communist generals. Due to the longstanding animosity between the Indonesian Army and the PKI, the coup was widely perceived in Indonesia as the PKI’s attempt to seize power. On 2 October, Major General Suharto launched an effective counterattack and later initiated a nation-wide anti-Communist campaign. 2 Due to public suspicion about the close connections between the Chinese and Indonesian communist parties, Chinese Indonesians became victims of harassment, robbery, and even murder. 3
In total, an estimated 500,000 Chinese responded to the above-mentioned campaigns by leaving Indonesia and returning to China. In 1967, Beijing suspended diplomatic relations with Jakarta.
Although more than half a century has passed since these events, our understanding of these five years full of complexity and contrast in Sino-Indonesian relations remains incomplete. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the lack of sources on foreign policy decision-making on both sides limited the study of the bilateral relationship during this period to analyses of news releases.
In the past decade, although the opening of Chinese archives has made it possible for historians to obtain an insider’s view on the formation of Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War, Indonesia and Sino-Indonesian relations have fallen by the wayside.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of Chinese language skills among Indonesianists, and a lack of scholarly interest in Indonesia among China historians. Hong Liu’s recently published China and the Shaping of Indonesia, for example, is the only piece of scholarship that has made use of newly available Chinese sources. The book is an inspiring account of Indonesian intellectual history as well as a detailed examination of cultural diplomacy between China and Indonesia during the years of 1949-1965. However, because Liu relies heavily on sources from the early to mid-1950s, his text largely ignores bilateral political interactions between China and Indonesia in the eventful and important years of 1960-1965.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)