Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War by Taomo Zhou

Abstract

Reviewed by: Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War by Taomo Zhou Kelly A. Hammond Taomo Zhou. Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 301 pp. $43.95 (cloth). Zhou Taomo makes important contributions to the growing field of postwar transnational histories of modern China. Migration in the Time of Revolution locates the history of the Cold War in the lives and experiences of ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia. These stories take us beyond the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) and help inform narratives of state building and political identity formation in these places. At the macro level, Zhou explores the state-to-state political maneuverings between the new postcolonial state, Indonesia, and the two political power brokers representing Chinese interests, the governments of the PRC and the ROC. At a more granular level, Zhou is able to highlight how the geopolitics in Asia had an impact on the daily lives of ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia. In order to achieve this, Zhou conceives of “diplomacy as a social process from the ground up” (11). This approach allows her to show how politics informs the social, and vice versa, in a way that does not “treat diplomacy and migration as two separate issues” (11). Zhou shows how the treatment of ethnic Chinese was regularly swept up in larger geopolitical currents as the political climate in Indonesia vacillated between pro-Communist and anti-Communist sentiments throughout the 1950s and 1960s (3–5). Drawing on Chinese sources from local, county, and national archives in China and Taiwan, along with published memoirs and interviews in both Chinese and Indonesian, Zhou pieces together a complex narrative that presents the reader with the opportunity to reflect on the processes of state construction in twentieth-century East and Southeast Asia. Throughout all this, Zhou never loses sight of Chinese people themselves, who were often politicized pawns in the anti- and pro-Communist camps that informed Asian politics throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The book centers around three main arguments. First, using new sources, Zhou is interested in dispelling the “widely circulated assertion that the suffering of the ethnic Chinese after the September Thirteenth Movement was a fitting retribution for Beijing’s alleged sponsorship of a ‘Communist Coup’ in Indonesia” (4). Second, although Beijing and Jakarta often had similar “strategic interests,” local political concerns regularly undermined their efforts to work together (4). Third, there was a deep cleavage between the Nationalist-supporting and Communist-supporting ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia, and both sides “claimed that all ethnic Chinese owed loyalty to China’s sole legitimate center,” be that Taipei or Beijing (5). As Zhou highlights, “overseas Chinese, who were oftentimes peripheral to nation-based bodies of knowledge, were at the center of a global battle for hearts and minds fought between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists” (12). These political tensions extended even further, to divisions between the peranakan, or the locally born ethnic Chinese, and the totok, who were mostly “foreign-born immigrants who continued to speak” their regional dialects of Chinese (6). This multiplicity of political, ethnic, and social identities that prevailed among the Chinese community in Indonesia meant that the political inclinations of the new state did not always align with the interests of the Chinese communities, and the rivalry between pro-Beijing and pro-Taipei factions forced its way into schools, newspapers, and the governance of civic organizations (8). [End Page E-25] The book is organized chronologically into 10 chapters, and the story begins at the end of the Japanese occupation of the archipelago. Chapter 1 explores ways that the Nationalists dealt with matters surrounding the new postcolonial status of Indonesia, focusing on issues of citizenship for ethnic Chinese who could technically be “claimed as citizens by both the ROC and the Republic of Indonesia,” but who were “protected by neither” (14). The next chapter examines the life of a transnational Chinese Communist named Ba Ren. Ba moved to the archipelago in the early 1940s and was among the cadres who helped the CCP to...