☆p.6☆
The ghettoes to which the Jews restricted their daily lives could be compared to the special living quarter which the Chinese built for themselves in many towns.
Many people, outsiders and Indonesians, picture the Chinese as a predominantly urban group. In speaking of Indonesia as a whole, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Chinese have seemed more urban than they really were. As Table 3 shows, in 1930 a majority of the Chinese actually lived in rural areas.
However, 1930 was not a typical year. Ever since the earliest settlements of Chinese traders in the harbor towns of the north coast, the Chinese in Java had tended to congregate in the towns. When the first Europeans visited these ports, they found the Chinese traders living in separate quarters of the towns. There was nothing peculiarly Chinese about this; other foreign traders, Indians for example, did likewise. In due course the Dutch, too, found it convenient to have the Chinese living in their own quarter of the towns; there they could look after their own government, under the leadership of Chinese officers appointed by the Dutch themselves. During the 19th century, earlier and more scattered measures to confine the Chinese to the towns were elevated into a more comprehensive system by which they were required to live in designated quarters and prohibits from traveling without a government pass.
The heavy rural concentrations of Chinese in Sumatra (especially along the east coast and on the islands of Bangka and Belitung) and West Kalimantan were of longer standing. In Sumatra many thousands of Chinese had been imported to work as coolies in the tobacco plantations and tin mines; in West Kalimantan many Chinese had migrated spontaneously to mine gold and had late settled as farmers.
☆p.7☆
Since the 1930s the trend has been for the Chinese throughout Indonesia to move away from the countryside. The world economic depression had a severe impact upon the Sumatra mines and plantations. Although some no doubt settled as farmers or fisherman, in many parts of Sumatra the Chinese population actually declined. The process was not simply one of urbanization; in 1932, for example, thousands of tin-miners were repatriated to China from Belitung. A mire general reason for the progressive urbanization of the Chinese since the 1930s has been insecurity. During the Japanese occupation and particularly the Indonesian revolution which followed it, many Chinese who had lived in rural areas sought safety in the cities. This process was accelerated again in the 1960s both as result of government regulations and the insecurity experienced by the Chinese in a period of political instability. The extent to which the Chinese in Java and Madura had become increasingly urbanized even before this latest acceleration in the process may be seen in Table 4. This also shows that the move back to the cities and towns by the Chinese has, despite their faster rate of population increase, been masked to some extent by the extremely rapid process of urbanization of the whole population.
It is true, as Muaja suggested, that the Chinese population 'isolated themselves' from the Indonesian population by building themselves special living quarters or ghettos in the towns? It is certainly true that most cities and towns of any size in Indonesia have their Chinese area in around the business centre. Densely populated, these have long contained large concentrations of Chinese, many of them shopkeepers with their families living in their shop house dwellings behind and above the stores. In the same area could be found a Chinese temple and, in more recent times, a cinema. This same area was usually the quarter (wijk) to which the Chinese were confined when the quarter system was still in force. Since that system was abandoned, Chinese have scattered to other parts of the cities and towns. Some of the wealthier joined members of the Indonesian elite in moving into the more
☆p.8☆
The changeless Chinese
'Sekali China, tetap China'(Once a Chinese, always a Chinese)
This strongly uniform, cohesive race, separated by seas and frontiers, is essentially one people with shared heritage, the Chinese civilization.
The myth of the uniformity and changelessness of the overseas Chinese dies hard, despite abundant evidence of their cultural diversity and capacity for acculturation to local ways of life and beliefs. The Chinese who came to Indonesia were not homogeneous even on their arrival. Although the majority of the immigrants came from Fukien and Kwangtung provinces, they were culturally very diverse, even to the extent of speaking mutually unintelligible ‘dialects’ of Chinese. Most were poorly educated, and it has been a 20th century phenomenon to have Chinese schools using kuuo-yu (Mandarin Chinese) as a means of transcending these linguistic differences.
☆p.9☆
The diversity of the immigrants was compounded by the variable degree to which their descendants were influenced by indigenous Indonesian cultures. Skinner, writing in 1961, suggested that ‘as a general rule if a given area of Indonesia was settled by Chinese in appreciable numbers prior to this century, Chinese society there is in some degree dichotomous today’. On the other hand, there was ‘the locally-rooted Chinese population’ in which ‘adults as well as children are Indonesia-born, the orientation toward China is attenuated, and the influence of Indonesian culture is apparent’. In the other sector of Chinese society, he argued, ‘the population consists of twentieth-century immigrants and their immediate descendants, who are less acculturated and more strongly oriented toward China’.
Moreover, the locally-rooted Chinese communities themselves vary greatly in the degree to which their culture has been subject to indigenous influence, and in the aspects of that culture which have been influenced. The variations are the outcome of many factors, of which Skinner singled out as particularly important the length of Chinese settlement (especially in relation to the period in which China-born women immigrants began to arrive) and the comparative cultural level of the indigenous population amongst whom they settled. He placed these communities along a continuum according to the degree of indigenous influence in their culture, ranging from the locally-rooted China of Bagan Siap-api (among whom indigenous influence was slight) to the peranakan Chinese of Java (among whom it was most pervasive). Similarly the aspects of the culture, settlement patterns, family structure, religious behavior, language and dress.
Recent social science writing about the Indonesian Chinese has paid particular attention to the distinction between peranakan and totok. The terms themselves have been taken over from usage amongst the Indonesian Chinese themselves (especially in Java). It is likely that the original distinction was a racial one; a totok Chinese was a genuine, pure Chinese, whereas a peranakan was one of mixed ancestry. A secondary meaning followed from the first; since Chinese immigration to Indonesia before the 20th century was almost exclusively by males, it followed that a totok Chinese was China-born, and that any Chinese born in Indonesia was a peranakan. Amongst the locally-rooted Chinese communities in Indonesia, there were some (especially in Java) which developed a distinctive culture which was heavily influenced by the culture of the particular Indonesian society in whose midst they had settled. One hallmark of these communities (which have come to be labeled peranakan) is the use by their members in daily speech of the Indonesian language (formerly Malay) or of some regional Indonesian language (or even, in the present century, of Dutch) rather than one or other various Chinese ‘dialects’ spoken by Chinese immigrants on their arrival (principally Hokkien, Hakka, Cantinese and Teochiu) or, in modern times, the national language, kuo-yu. Thus a third sense in which these terms have been used is a socio-culture one, rather than one based upon race or birthplace. It is this third usage which has dominated social science writing about the Indonesian Chinese in the last two decades.
☆pp.10
Using the criterion of language of daily use, an attempt has been made elsewhere to demonstrate the size and distribution of peranakan and totok Chinese communities throughout Indonesia (including the relative usage of Indonesian and regional Indonesian language amongst the peranakan) on the basis of the 1920 census results. Although due caution must be urged against assuming that the patterns prevailing then persisted into the 1960s, it may be useful (in the absence of any late comparable data) to present a summary of the situation in 1920 as set out in Table 5.
This Table graphically demonstrates that, far from remaining for ever Chinese, some 40 per cent of the Indonesian Chinese In 1920 did not use any form of the Chinese language as their language of daily use (which was defined as the language of the home) but used an Indonesian language instead. Detailed local studies of Chinese communities in Java have show that this linguistic acculturation amongst the peranakan Chinese is only part of a much wider process by which the locally-rooted Chinese have shed many of their Chinese characteristics and taken on Indonesian one.
☆pp.11
If acculturation amongst the Indonesian Chinese has been so profound, why then has the image of the ‘changeless Chinese’ continued to have its adherents? It should first of all be noted that more than 85 per cent of those defined as peranakan in Table 5 were to be found in Java. Although this was to some extent a reflection of the longer history of Chinese settlement there, there were other parts of Indonesia in which Chinese had also long been settled (notably West Kalimantan) where indigenous culture had made much less impression on them. More importantly, the acceleration