Charles A. Coppel

Revisiting Furnivall's ‘plural society’: Colonial Java as a mestizo society?

Abstract J. S. Furnivalls characterization of Java in the last half‐century of colonial rule as a ‘plural society’ has largely been taken for granted by most scholars who have supported or opposed the applicability of the concept in a Caribbean or African context. In the ‘plural society’ of colonial Java, according to Furnivall, Europeans, Chinese and natives each held by their own religion, their own culture and language, meeting as individuals only in the market place. This article re‐examines the case of colonial Java, which first prompted Furnivall to use the concept, paying particular attention to the Chinese. It argues that at the time he invented the term, he exaggerated the ‘pluralistic’ features of colonial society, and that, when applied to the situation at the turn of the century, the concept was quite misleading. Rather, it is suggested, colonial society in the urban centres of Java at that time might in many respects just as well be characterized as a ‘mestizo society’.

A genocide that never was: explaining the myth of anti-Chinese massacres in Indonesia, 1965-66

Many publications refer incorrectly to extensive massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1965–66. Approximately half a million people were killed in this period, but the victims were overwhelmingly members and associates of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Chinese Indonesians experienced serious harassment but relatively few were killed. The persistence of this myth is attributed to a trope dating back to the seventeenth century which equates the social position of Chinese in Indonesia with that of Jews in Europe and which thus predicts periodic pogroms and attempts at genocide. The myth has survived partly because it inspires a sense of urgency in combating discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, but it encourages a misunderstanding of the causes of intense violence in Indonesia and raises serious moral issues concerning genocide denial by substitution.

Special Issue Foreword

Whatever the uncertainties or continuities which were to follow, the fall of President Suharto in May 1998, after presiding over his ‘New Order’ regime for more than three decades, has widely been regarded as a watershed in Indonesia’s political history. The President’s resignation was triggered by an outbreak of the most serious anti-Chinese violence for many years, and it is a premise of the papers presented in this issue of Asian Ethnicity that May 1998 was also a historical turning point for Chinese Indonesians. There has been a long history of anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia. Undoubtedly, the worst incident was the massacre which occurred under the auspices of the VOC (United Dutch East India company) in 1740 in Batavia (present day Jakarta). The ‘disturbances’ (troebelen) were not the result of some primordial conflict between indigenous Indonesians and Chinese immigrants, but were the response of the Dutch to an uprising by Chinese against colonial rule. Anti-Chinese violence became more common in the final decades of the Netherlands’ rule over the Indies, especially during the heyday of the first Indonesian mass organisation Sarekat Islam, and in the insecure periods of the Japanese invasion and the Indonesian struggle for independence. Since independence, there have been a number of outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence, of which the worst (prior to the onset of the New Order) were those associated with the implementation of Presidential decree number 10 of 1959 banning retail trade by aliens in rural areas, and the politically inspired riots in West Java (especially in Sukabumi and Bandung) in the first half of 1963. The insecurity and discrimination associated with the 1959 decree (which affected many Indonesian citizens as well as aliens) caused the largest known exodus of ethnic Chinese from Indonesia. The transition to the New Order after the ‘coup attempt’ of 1 October 1965 was a period of insecurity and massive violence, in which it is generally accepted that some 500,000 people were killed. Although the ethnic Chinese experienced widespread violence in this period, it would be misleading to say that many of them were among those killed. Although statements to this effect are not uncommon, the evidence suggests that the number of fatalities among them was disproportionately low (with the important exception of the Dayak raids in West Kalimantan in late 1967). Similarly, although some Chinese suffered lesser forms of violence to the person or were detained on political grounds, the most characteristic form of anti-Chinese violence was damage to property. But there was certainly a dread in the Chinese population that they

Chinese Overseas: The Particular and the General

AbstractThe study of Chinese overseas is part of the study of humanity. To make it manageable, we have to reduce its scope. To make it meaningful, we have to use generalizations or abstract terms which encapsulate generalizations. Like human beings as a whole, the Chinese overseas are very heterogeneous, but we believe that somehow they are a meaningful subject of scholarly study. The paper explores some of the dilemmas of the general and the particular in the history of the peranakan Chinese of Java, themselves a far from homogeneous group.

After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860-1940 (review)

TWO DECADES AGO THE LATE JENNIFER CUSHMAN wrote that, for students of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the literature on the Chinese in Australia seemed dated. She suggested that Australian historians were “still struggling to escape from an historiographical discourse limited by their colonial past” and had, for the most part, “not managed to relocate the Chinese experience within the Chinese community itself.” In particular, they had been “less concerned with the community on its own terms, and more with Australian attitudes towards Chinese.” She attributed this “imbalance” to “an historiographical preoccupation with explaining the formation of the White Australia Policy” (Cushman 1984: 100–101). Much has changed since then. Interest in the history of the Chinese in Australia has greatly increased. The new historical writing is noteworthy for its diversity of practitioners and subject matter. As Henry Chan points out in the volume under review, a tradition developed of “linking academic researchers and historians with professional historians, community based amateur or freelance historians and researchers” (p.237). This pattern was set with the conferences held at the Museum of Chinese Australian History (Chinese Museum) in Melbourne in October 1993 and at the University of Western Australia in September 1994 (Macgregor 1995; Ryan 1995). After the Rush is a collection of 17 chapters selected from papers presented at a conference held at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne in July 2000. It was held under the auspices of the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation (CHAF) Project, a joint initiative of La Trobe University, the Chinese Museum and Shanghai’s East China Normal University. The conference program and abstracts may be found on the project website . The book is organized into three parts around major themes in Australian history after the gold rush: regulation and governance, participation in public life, and community and identity formation. An introductory chapter by Adam McKeown attempts an overview of the book and its place in the historiography of the Chinese in Australia and in the global diaspora. He makes interesting suggestions for future research, advocating a new synthetic history of Chinese in Australia that straddles local, national and transnational perspectives. One could not expect a project geared to the commemoration of Australian federation to ignore the White Australia Policy, whatever the validity of Cushman’s criticism of earlier work on the history of Chinese Australians. The first substantial