Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996-1999. By Jemma Purdey. Published by Asian Studies Association of Australia, Southern Asia Publication Series, 2006. ISBN 9971-69-332-1. $35.00 website
The ethnic Chinese in Indonesia have been the source of a number of sociological and political academic writings in Australia, but time and time again we see that only when an issue hits the mainstream media does it enter the consciousness of the community at large.
Early in 1999 the issue of ethnic Chinese began to feature in the international news when local non-governmental organisations broke the silence on the rapes of mostly ethnic Chinese women during the May 1998 riots, riots initially widely reported for human fatalities among demonstrating students, and for the devastation of business districts in some Indonesian cities.
The issue then took on a life of its own. In Australia, however, it did not spread far beyond Indonesian-interest groups, though enough for some people to believe that ethnic Chinese were being murdered, or at least victimised and chased out of the country. These people tended to become confused when they went to visit Jakarta and found Chinese-looking people going about their business, seemingly without fear.
Jemma Purdey’s book, Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996-1999, goes a long way towards placing the events in their correct social and political context.
To begin with, ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are not an homogenous entity. While it is a fact that most came from the southern regions of China, these regions are sufficiently diverse in culture that they each have their own languages, tastes in cuisine, prominence in collective skills, and perhaps even collective ethos and temperament.
And they did not migrate to Indonesia at the same time, to the same place, or for the same purpose. Generations of Chinese-descended people can be found in the poorer areas on the outskirts of Jakarta for example. In the meantime, there have been families, some descendants of Dutch-appointed Chinese Captains, living comfortably in various parts of Java. They are not all actively involved in business as is popularly stereotyped, either. And inevitably, there are widely-differing degrees of integration into local communities.
While she focuses on events occuring between 1996-1999, Purdey also takes the reader back to instances of violence in earlier periods, providing context. In fact, each incident or explosion of violence is placed in a social-political background, though without always providing a clear-cut explanation as to why it happened.
There are instances documented where flare-ups had nothing to do