Since the nationalization in 1957-1958 of the Dutch business enterprises that had dominated the economy, including most of the country's largest plantations, mines, banks, and business houses, many Chinese firms previously confined to an intermediate position in the colonial caste structure, as Wertheim has called it,1 have been able to advance to the topmost ranks in the present economic structure of Indonesia. Collectively, they now overshadow the previously dominant state sector made up largely of those nationalized enterprises. The two largest Chinese firms, Liem Sioe Liong's vast conglomerate and William Soeryadjaya's Astra Corporation, hold assets that were estimated to be worth Rp. 6.4 trillion and Rp. 2 trillion respectively (US$3.5 billion and $1.2 billion) in 1988, whereas ten others are in the $400-$700 million range and another one hundred or so exceed the $100 million mark.2 By any measure, international as well as local, the foremost of these men can aptly be called tycoons, businessmen of extraordinary wealth and power, in the dictionary definition, whose wealth far exceeds that of their predecessors earlier in the century, Dutch as well as Chinese. In contrast, none of the wealthiest Chinese towkay of the 1920s (a word that refers rather indeterminately to a Chinese big businessman, although not always an especially rich one) could have been compared with the big Dutch capitalists of the era, apart from the almost legendary Oei Tiong Ham, to whom I will return shortly.3