Chinese-Indonesians

Chinese-Indonesians (Tionghoa) are Indonesians of Chinese descent, the product of many centuries of migration from southern China into the archipelago. They are a small minority with a large presence: prominent in commerce, concentrated in the big cities, and, since the reforms that followed Soeharto's fall in 1998, full and equal citizens in law.

Their history in Indonesia runs to extremes. Many families have prospered, some spectacularly, mostly through business. Yet the community has also been the target of periodic violence, the worst in living memory being the riots of May 1998. Understanding both halves of that story explains a good deal about how Chinese-Indonesians are seen, and see themselves, today.

Demography

Indonesia's census does not systematically record ethnicity, so all figures are estimates. The 2010 census, the last to count ethnic groups in detail, recorded 2,832,510 Chinese-Indonesians, roughly 1.2 per cent of the population and the fifteenth-largest of more than 600 ethnic groups. The 2020 census did not produce a full ethnic breakdown; demographic estimates put the community at around 3.28 million, still close to 1.2 per cent of the national total of some 270 million. Older claims of "nine million" or "less than four per cent" are not supported by any census and should be treated as inflated.

The community is economically diverse: alongside the wealthy entrepreneurs there are labourers, shopkeepers and small traders. But it is genuinely over-represented at the top. Of the fifty richest Indonesians on the 2016 Forbes list, 44 were ethnic Chinese, holding some 87 per cent of that group's combined wealth. The popular belief that ethnic Chinese "own the economy" or control "70 per cent" of it is a stereotype rather than a fact, and a dangerous one: it has repeatedly been used to justify hostility. Disproportionate wealth at the very top is real; blanket dominance is a myth.

Religion is part of what has historically set the community apart. Chinese-Indonesians are predominantly Buddhist, Confucian or Christian, with smaller numbers following Taoism, Islam and Hinduism. In a country whose population is roughly 87 per cent Muslim, this non-Muslim majority has at times sharpened the sense of difference, and it is one reason religious politics has fallen so heavily on prominent Chinese-Indonesian figures.

Origins and settlement

Most Chinese-Indonesians trace their ancestry to the southern Chinese provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan. Migration came in broad waves: early trade contact from around the fifteenth century, a larger movement in the nineteenth around the Opium Wars, and a further influx in the first half of the twentieth century. The main groups are Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, Hokchia and others, each historically concentrated in particular regions, Hokkien across Sumatra and eastern Indonesia, Teochew and Hakka in West Kalimantan, Peranakan communities in Java and Makassar.

A long-standing distinction separates the Peranakan, families of older settlement who intermarried with local women and became creolised in language and custom, from the totok, more recent arrivals who remained culturally Chinese. Colonial land policy pushed most Chinese into trade and labour rather than farming; the largest populations today are urban, in Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan, Semarang, Pontianak, Makassar, Palembang, Bandung and Pekanbaru.

The colonial pattern and the 1740 massacre

Friction between Chinese settlers and the indigenous majority (pribumi) has deep roots in Dutch colonial policy. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) placed the Chinese in an intermediate legal caste, above the pribumi but below Europeans, and leaned on them as traders, tax farmers and middlemen. This gave some families an early commercial advantage, and left the community permanently exposed as a visible, resented economic layer between rulers and ruled, a position it would occupy under successive regimes.

That exposure turned lethal in October 1740, when the Dutch authorities in Batavia unleashed a three-day massacre of the city's Chinese residents; the death toll is usually estimated at around 10,000. Survivors were confined to a designated quarter, Glodok, which remains Jakarta's Chinatown to this day. Migration continued regardless, because the economic opportunities outweighed the risks, and the community grew more internally divided, between those who identified with the Dutch, those who kept ties to China, and the increasingly assimilated Peranakan.

Nationalism and independence

Chinese-Indonesians were among the pioneers of the Indonesian press, and some took real risks for the independence cause. In 1928 the Chinese-run weekly Sin Po was the first paper to print the text of the national anthem, "Indonesia Raya". Loyalties were split: some aligned with Dutch interests to protect their businesses, others joined nationalist parties, and later arrivals followed the Kuomintang-versus-communist divide playing out in China itself. The precise scale of Chinese-Indonesian participation in the 1945-49 revolution remains disputed, and the question is politically charged, because it has long been tied to arguments about whether the community truly "belongs".

After independence, that ambiguity was used against them. Chinese-Indonesian businesses were accused of wartime disloyalty and forced to give up assets, the first of many restrictions on the community's rights. In 1959, Government Regulation PP 10/1959 barred non-citizens from retail trade in rural areas, forcing many Chinese traders out of the countryside; enforcement in places was violent.

The New Order years

Under Soeharto, who took power after the events of 1965, discrimination became systematic. Chinese-Indonesians were pressed to adopt Indonesian-sounding names, surrendering family names in some cases traceable back many generations. Chinese-language schools, publications and public cultural expression were banned. Chinese religion and festivals were driven out of public life by Presidential Instruction 14/1967. Because ethnic Chinese were shut out of the civil service, the military and academia, most turned to private enterprise, where their success made them convenient targets for extortion by officials and, at intervals, for mob violence.

The system reduced the community to a source of bribes and a scapegoat. The suspicion that Chinese-Indonesians were "colluding" with a corrupt bureaucracy was, in large part, a product of a bureaucracy that gave them no legal way to operate without paying. The pattern culminated in May 1998, when, with the economy collapsing, mobs and army elements attacked Chinese-Indonesians in Jakarta and other cities, with widespread killing, looting and rape. The riots drew international condemnation. Many families emigrated; some never returned. Soeharto resigned days later, on 21 May 1998.

Legal equality since 1998

The reform era (Reformasi) dismantled the legal architecture of discrimination, and this is the part of the story most out of date in older accounts. The sequence matters:

• President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid issued Presidential Instruction 6/2000 (17 January 2000), revoking Soeharto's 1967 ban and permitting open Chinese religious and cultural celebration. Imlek (Chinese New Year) became an optional holiday the following year.
• President Megawati Soekarnoputri then made Imlek a full national public holiday through Keppres 19/2002, effective from 2003, when it was observed nationally for the first time.
• The Citizenship Law No. 12/2006 replaced the "highly discriminatory" 1958 law, recognising Chinese-Indonesians born in Indonesia as native citizens with full rights, including eligibility to stand for president. It removed the legal basis for the SBKRI, the citizenship-proof certificate that officials had long demanded specifically of ethnic Chinese.
• Law No. 40/2008 on the Elimination of Racial and Ethnic Discrimination made discrimination by race or ethnicity a criminal offence, with oversight assigned to the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM).
• Presidential Decree Keppres 12/2014, signed by President Yudhoyono on 14 March 2014, formally replaced the term "Cina" with "Tionghoa" in official use (and the country's name with "Tiongkok"), citing the discriminatory harm the older word carried.

The practical effect is that the older picture, of ethnic Chinese still forced to carry SBKRI certificates and marked by a distinguishing digit on their identity cards, describes the New Order, not present-day Indonesia. Residual demands for the SBKRI did persist in some local offices for years after it was abolished, and the law does not by itself erase prejudice. But codified, official discrimination against Chinese-Indonesians has been removed, and the modern e-KTP identity system carries no ethnic marker.

Public and cultural life today

Chinese-Indonesian participation in public life is now mainstream rather than exceptional. The clearest example is Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian of Chinese descent who was elected deputy governor of Jakarta in 2012 alongside Joko Widodo, then served as governor from 2014 to 2017, the first ethnic Chinese to hold the post. That his term ended in a blasphemy conviction and imprisonment in 2017, after mass demonstrations laced with anti-Chinese sentiment, shows the community's standing is real but still contested. Ahok remained an active national political figure at the time of writing. Others, such as media proprietor Hary Tanoesoedibjo, lead national political parties.

Confucianism has been restored as one of Indonesia's six officially recognised religions, and Imlek is now celebrated openly across the country, with lion and dragon dances, lanterns and public festivities that would have been illegal a generation ago. Chinese characters appear again on shopfronts; Mandarin schools, closed for decades, have reopened, and younger Chinese-Indonesians who grew up without the language are learning it. Chinese-Indonesians have also long excelled in badminton, Indonesia's national passion, from Rudy Hartono and Liem Swie King to Susi Susanti, Christian Hadinata and Alan Budikusuma. Glodok and the Chinatowns of other cities are living neighbourhoods, not relics.

Language

Older Chinese-Indonesians may speak Mandarin or a regional dialect, Hokkien in Medan, Teochew in Pontianak, Hakka in parts of West Kalimantan. For almost everyone under 40, however, the first language is Bahasa Indonesia. The dialects survive mainly among the elderly and in specific regional communities, while a new generation learns Mandarin by choice rather than inheritance.

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