The ethnic Chinese's dilemma

By Beni Sindhunata

This is the first of two articles on the issue related to ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.

JAKARTA (JP): Three months after the outbreak of violent unrest in the middle of May, debates on the presence of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are still going on, assuming greater transparency and permeating into various aspects of life.

Members of the community have even engaged in more daring, actual, open and honest debates through letters to the editor columns in various print media, reflecting, therefore, how the Indonesian community views ethnic Chinese as one of the ethnic groups in Indonesia.

On the whole, however, the greater part of discussions on ethnic Chinese has been devoted to criticism of some ethnic Chinese who are tycoons or well-off people -- those of the upper middle-class and upward -- and immediately labeled as economic animals with all their evil stereotyping. Briefly speaking, the focus has been only on businesspeople like Eddy Tansil (Tan Tjoe Hin), while there are actually many other ethnic Chinese who are in the same boat as Hiu Po Thin of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, who opted to commit suicide along with four of his children owing to the pressure of extreme poverty, among the 202 million people inhabiting some 17,000 islands making up this Indonesian archipelago.

As a result, the ethnic Chinese live in a classical black-and- white dichotomy, stereotyping which has given birth to various myths and realities from economic domination, practices related to corruption, collusion and nepotism down to the history of the origin of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.

It is true that the government has never given any official figure on the number of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, although data on this are available and traceable. According to a report in the July 18 edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal, quoting data compiled by The Economist, the number of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia is around 3.5 percent of the country's total population.

The Javanese account for 45 percent of the total population, the Sundanese 14 percent, Madurese 7.5 percent, Malay 7.5 percent and various other ethnic groups account for 22.5 percent. The Overseas Chinese Economic Yearbook (quoted by Mercury News, Washington, June 1994) put the number of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia at 7.2 million people.

If the number is assumed to grow at an average of 1.5 percent per year, it may now have reached about eight million people, or 4 percent of the country's total population. What counts, however, is not the number of ethnic Chinese, but rather what the presence of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia is like at present and what it will be in future.

Undeniably, no ethnic or racial groups in the world are perfect. Having descended from Adam and later spreading and multiplying the world over, they must have their own adverse attitude and behavior. It is, therefore, sheer thoughtlessness to pass a verdict on a certain ethnic group on the basis of generalization of a particular behavior, which possibly may be found in other ethnic groups.

So it is not wrong to say that under different scales and methods, many ethnic Chinese are bad in character. In this respect, there appears a clear dichotomy of ethnic Chinese -- the rich and the poor. This is the root of the problem, something that can most easily be used as a trigger to a certain happening in the interest of a goal inseparable to a macro dimension.

Many parties fail to realize that there is a wide gap among the ethnic Chinese themselves, which is as wide as the gap between the rich and the poor in Indonesian society in general. In principle, there is no spiritual relationship and family bond between rich and poor ethnic Chinese in their most real daily lives.

That means that well-off ethnic Chinese, especially those in the category of tycoons and upper middle-class businesspeople, do not practically always lend a hand to poor ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in various aspects of life. They will neither offer practical help to the latter nor have the practical desire to do so.

A reward-and-merit system usually governs the relationship among ethnic Chinese. Of course, kinship in its positive sense leading to a win-win solution has enabled ethnic Chinese to forge good cooperation among themselves.

In the absence of this win-win solution, many in the ethnic Chinese group have engaged in mutual destruction and life-long all-out wars.

Business wars involving business tycoons in various industrial sectors -- chemicals, plastics, flour, automobiles, motorcycles, steel and instant noodles, for example -- may serve as good examples in this regard. Competition to win megaprojects worth hundreds of billions and trillions of rupiah, where nepotistic, collusive and corrupt practices are rampant, are other good examples.

All these processes, however, can only run well if good cooperation is established with other Indonesian citizens and government officials, from the highest rank to the lowest. One must therefore be willing to accept the fact that Eddy Tansil, Hendra Rahardja, the late Hindoro Halim or Bambang Samijono, could not have been without accomplices when committing bank scams.

The present government would score a tremendous success if it succeeded in arresting and then punishing a handful of ethnic Chinese involved in nepotistic, collusive and corrupt practices. The successful extradition of a top executive involved in a bank scam would deserve the thumbs-up, but greater praise would be lavished on the government if it arrested Eddy Tansil, who escaped from prison.

A longer list of negative things may, of course, be drawn up and the list may encompass other ethnic groups in Indonesia. What counts in this respect, however, is the essence of the matter.

The writer is chief research officer at the Center for Indonesia Business Data.