Shaping Indonesia

Lee Kam Hing

This well-researched and cogently presented study shows how images of an idealized China came to occupy a central place inIndonesia’s post-independence political discourse. Indonesian leaders during the Sukarno era, Liu contends, admired Mao’s China and sought from it “conceptual and practical inspiration” for their nation-building efforts.

To be sure,China did not lend itself easily to favourable representation. Even with expanding Sino-Indonesia ties in the period of study, unease remained among Indonesians towards a rising Chinese power set against historical memory of past invasion of Java by Mongol-ruled China. This was compounded by the presence of an economically strong Chinese minority in their midst. It was a wariness arising also out of the scars of the communist-led 1948 Madiun rebellion and of a resurgent Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). There was also a struggle for power among political forces, including the PKI and anti-communists. And, in an Indonesia which was a functional democracy there were intellectuals critical of China’s authoritarian system and the lack of freedom in Chinese society.

Nation building

Liu argues that to Indonesians during the Sukarno years,China became more than just another nation-state.China, through multiple and sometimes conflicting images, featured in their many intense nation-building debates. Although Indonesia and China emerged as modern states at the same time in 1949, Indonesian intellectuals asked how China could achieve so much in such a short time while their country continued to be plagued by economic stagnation and internal political problems. Liu suggests that the China image when considered by Indonesian leaders alongside their competing visions and aspirations was transformed into what he called ‘the China metaphor’. The metaphor in reflecting the disappointments of Indonesians also served as a model to realize what they aspired for in their country.

To captureIndonesia’sChinaimages, Liu who is one ofChina’s leading scholars on Southeast Asia and presently Professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, went through what had been written aboutChinaby some sixty prominent Indonesians of the period. Some of the leaders were members of the PKI who, not surprisingly, viewedChinafavourably. Others were non-communists, among whom Sutan Sjahrir, a former Prime Minister, and Mohd Hatta who served as Vice-president. It wasIndonesia’s founding President Sukarno and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, its best-known novelist, who among all seemed most impressed by developments taking place inChina.

For such a study, some may ask whether a sufficiently broad spectrum of views representative of important segments of society had been obtained and if these were drawn evenly from across the time period looked at. In this book, Indonesian writings cited came mainly from the 1950s with few references fromIndonesia’s Guided Democracy period whenChinafeatured strongly in Indonesian political consciousness and was itself encountering internal stresses. There is also no reference to the powerful Indonesian military whose views onChinaparticularly those leading up to the 1965 PKI-linked Coup must have been pertinent to theChinametaphor.

Liu describes how leading Indonesians during the Sukarno years were invited toChinaas part ofBeijing’s efforts to winIndonesia’s friendship amidst heightening Cold War tension in the region. These Indonesians returned with generally positive accounts of the country they saw. They found among the Chinese a sense of purposefulness, discipline and willingness to make sacrifices for the new nation. They saw cities that were clean and public services that worked. And enteringChinafromHong Kong, Indonesian visitors encountered a way of life they judged as less decadent. Liu sums up that China, to admiring Indonesians, was a nation undergoing economic growth with equitable sharing of wealth, of a populist regime supported by the people, and of intellectuals actively participating in nation-building.

For Pramoedya, it was universal humanism expressed by Chinese intellectuals that attracted his attention and on this he had much to share during his two trips toChinain the late 1950s. Pramoedya was impressed too by the productive output of intellectuals and the higher rewards and status they were accorded compared to those inIndonesia.

Idealized image

Liu suggests thatIndonesia’s idealized image ofChinadiffered greatly from Western observers who viewed the country as a repressive, totalitarian communist state. Indonesians disassociated theChinathey admired from its communist ideology and instead credited the creation of a disciplined, cohesive and harmonious society to Chinese nationalism and the new democracy. Sukarno saw no incompatibilities between the ideas drivingChinaand his own views, and his interpretation ofChina’s political experience served as a key rationale for the introduction of Guided Democracy that greatly concentrated power in the president’s hands. Disenchanted with Western-style democracy,Chinaas a model appealed to Sukarno.

In setting the discussion of theChinametaphor withinIndonesia’s efforts at nation-building, Liu invites a relook at modernity theories beyond those that are Western-dominant. Elaborating on S.N Eisenstadt’s reference to “multiple modernities” Liu asserted that a transnational and intranational flow of ideas and people encouraged the articulation of the idea of ‘Asianism’ and consequently the search for modernity in the Asian context. It was this two-way flow of ideas that led to an appreciation amongIndonesia’s political elite of another path to modernity which was Chinese in nature.

The Chinese metaphor inIndonesia’s search for an alternative modernity route is a fascinating proposition by Liu. Nevertheless, in the wider Indonesian society deeply rooted in Islam and Javanese culture, one is reminded that there had always been competing sources of inspirations and strategies to overcome the country’s economic and political challenges. That the Chinese model was most positively appreciated, as Liu noted, simply underlined “the complex characteristics and ambivalent nature” ofIndonesia’s intellectuals and politicians as well as of the political mood of the period.

More nuanced understanding

Indonesia’s contemplation of theChinaroute ended abruptly following the failed PKI-inspired coup in 1965 and the overthrow of Sukarno. TheChinathat captured the imagination of Indonesian leaders itself went through political convulsions during the Cultural Revolution.

Diplomatic relations betweenJakartaandBeijingwere restored only in 1990. But it is a differentChinathat Indonesians today encounter.Chinahas abandoned many of the features that once impressed visiting Indonesians andBeijinghas since 1978 embarked on reforms and a more open economy. It is not world revolution that propelsChina’s return toIndonesiabut markets and natural resources.Indonesiatoo has changed to a politically freer and more competitive environment. Indonesian leaders, like those who preceded them, recognize the progress and potential of an emergingChina.

Liu Hong’s study draws together very complex sets of perceptions and perspectives into a coherent narrative. This is timely and helpful in enabling an understanding not only of evolving relations betweenChinaand Indonesia, but also how Indonesians view their country’s development both in the past and the present. It brings new research approaches, drawing upon extensive and little used Indonesian and Chinese sources including recently opened records of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, to achieve a richer and more nuanced understanding not only ofIndonesia’s turbulent Constitutional and Guided Democracy years but also of a society’s self- criticism amidst competing aspirations.

Lee Kam Hing

Book Jacket

China and the Shaping of Indonesia, 1949-1965

Hong Liu
NUS Press, 2011
978-9971-69-381-7

The interactions and mutual perceptions of China and Indonesia were a significant element in Asia’s postcolonial transformation, but as a result of the prevailing emphasis on diplomatic and political relations within a Cold War and nation-state framework, their multi-dimensional interrelationship and its complex domestic ramifications have escaped scholarly scrutiny.

China and the Shaping of lndonesia provides a meticulous account of versatile interplay between knowledge, power, ethnicity, and diplomacy in the context of Sino-Indonesian interactions between 1949 and 1965. Taking a transnational approach that views Asia as a flexible geographical and political construct，this book addresses three central questions. First, what images of China were prevalent in Indonesia, and how were narratives about China construed and reconstructed? Second, why did the China Metaphor — the projection of an imagined foreign land onto the local intellectual and political milieu — become central to Indonesians’ conception of themselves and a cause for self criticism and rediscovery? Third, how was the China Metaphor incorporated into Indonesia’s domestic politics and culture, and how did it affect the postcolonial transformation, the fate of the ethnic Chinese minority, and Sino-lndonesian diplomacy?

Employing a wide range of hitherto untapped primary materials in Indonesian and Chinese as well as his own interviews, Hong Liu presents a compelling argument that many influential politicians and intellectuals, among them Sukarno, Hatta, and Pramoedya, utilized China as an alternative model of modernity in conceiving and developing projects of social engineering, cultural regeneration and political restructuring that helped shape the trajectory of modern Indonesia. The multiplicity of China thus constituted a site of political contestations and intellectual imaginations. The study is a major contribution both to the intellectual and political history of Indonesia and to the reconceptualization of Asian studies; it also serves as a timely reminder of the importance of historicizing China’s rising soft power in a transnational Asia.

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