The ethnic Chinese's dilemma

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.