Institutions, culture and economy
It is saddening to read the letter of Mirna Mutiara Govt must protect all communities in The Jakarta Post of Aug. 24 in which it is written that Indonesians of Chinese descent who are oppressed are victims, instead of as a result of something and that every effect has a cause.
And it is further suggested that the government, to protect both Indonesians of Chinese descent and indigenous people, should institute policies of having organizational structure with 50:50 ratio of indigenous and Chinese-Indonesian in business or whatever organization involving the welfare of the community.
These sort of suggestions are very retrogressive and lack merit. Just look what has happened to the Indonesian economy after so many affirmative-action economic policies in the past, and especially the rural economy more than four decades after hundreds of thousands of well-integrated Indonesians of Chinese descent were uprooted from their rural homes by Government Regulation No. 10 of 1959.
Arguably, our Indonesian rural economy would be much better off today with the ethnic Chinese there and, arguably, these ethnic Chinese are the essential missing link between our urban and rural economies.
Remember that the ethnic Chinese here in Indonesia are totally powerless. Although they have adapted to many discriminatory policies and have at times prospered, they are still essentially outsiders as shown by the cases in the book by Chirot/Reid.
It would be more enlightening if Mirna would read the book and papers by Professor Yoshihara Kunio of Kyoto University, especially on the topic of institutions, culture and economic growth, in which he propounds and elaborates on how institutions, including both formal ones like the rule of law, and informal ones like customs and culture, or the utility functions of average people, such as savings, learning, the work-leisure trade-off, risk taking and conceptions of what is right and wrong and the responses to these, have influenced the economic growth and wealth accumulation of people.
Mirna has drawn the wrong causal relationship here.
SIA KA-MOU, Jakarta