Throughout most of President Suharto's long term in office (1966–98) the People's Republic of China was Indonesia's ‘great Satan’, severed from diplomatic engagement, expunged from Indonesian cultural life and public memory. Diplomatic relations resumed in 1990, and today China is the subject of public discourse in Indonesia, its economic growth admired, its status as a regional and international player acknowledged. Professor Hong Liu says the rise of China compels Indonesians to ask: How do they do it? Is China a viable model for Indonesia's own economic and political life? Does China offer a more relevant form of modernity than the West?
Historically, Hong Liu argues, there were always flows of people and ideas between China and polities in the Indonesian archipelago. When cut off by Western imperialism, Indonesians only knew China through Indonesia's own Chinese, whom they regarded with contempt as tools of colonialism, unprincipled, and having offensive personal habits. But, in Indonesia's first fifteen years as a sovereign republic, Liu documents that China again became important to Indonesians.
Between 1950 and 1965 over three hundred Indonesians prominent in politics and the arts were fêted as guests of the Chinese government. They toured factories, spoke at conferences, were given audience with office holders at the highest levels. Back home they expressed their admiration for China in speeches distributed by the mass media. China's embassy in Jakarta reinforced their glowing reports through cultural events, Indonesian-language translations of Chinese political and literary documents, and radio broadcasts.
China and Indonesia were born in the same year. But, to China's Indonesian visitors, the fruits of independence seemed very different. Where Indonesia was torn by strife, its government corrupt, its economy stagnant, China appeared orderly, harmonious, its people thrifty and hardworking, its public intellectuals honoured as leaders in nation-building. Here was China pulling its millions out of poverty, creating a ‘New Democracy’, nationalistic, populist at home, anti-imperialist abroad. China became a metaphor in their quest for a better Indonesia.
Guided tours convey what the host wishes to be known. But how could so many Indonesians have been so naïve? After all, many visited China during the Great Leap Forward and Anti-Rightists campaigns. Liu offers four explanations. First, the human weakness of vanity: visiting Indonesians were treated like princes. Sukarno found Mao's China flattered him more than did the United States and the Soviet Union. Second, Indonesian visitors so admired China's socio-economic transformation that they accepted what they were told. The third explanation lies in the manner in which Indonesians analysed China. They did not study the political institutions that enabled mass mobilisation or acknowledge that Communist ideology brooked no dissent. Rather, Indonesians explained China's ‘miracle’ in racial terms: Oriental characteristics of diligence, subordination and unified spirit. Communism was not the driver, but nationalism and populism. These were characteristics that could be harnessed in the Indonesian republic too.
Liu's fourth explanation is the shutting down of dissent in Sukarno's Guided Democracy. From 1960, Liu writes, the political and cultural visions of Sukarno and Pramoedya dominated. Contrary views — that China was a Soviet satellite, a Communist dictatorship that enslaved its people and made them worship a ruthless Mao — were confined to the few, had little impact, and were silenced.
Could a nation of Muslims really embrace a Communist model? Liu's purpose is not to follow Islamic politics in Indonesia. His transnationalism is Asian; there is no consideration of a Middle Eastern dimension in his construction of Indonesian thinking. True, in the 1950s there was no Muslim state with a comparable socio-economic revolution as China's. But, in his analysis of the rise today of the China model, Liu ignores debates in Indonesia about Muslim democracy and whether Indonesia can be a model for the new Middle East.
Hong Liu brings a fresh appraisal of Indonesia's parliamentary and guided democracy periods. PRC archives allow him to explore the China side of the story. He draws on Indonesian speeches, literary polemics, magazine and newspaper articles, and on Western analyses of China and theories of modernisation. The appendix gives biographical notes on the many opinion-makers who went to China. All were men. But would female leaders have seen China differently? The pampered elite who lauded China's industrialisation never themselves worked with aching backs on a production line in Indonesia or laboured without safety protections in its mines.
China and the shaping of Indonesia is to be highly recommended. The writing is lucid, the breadth of research impressive. Chapters are larded with quotations from the primary sources, illustrated with images from magazines, calendars and press reports. Each chapter ends with a concise summary. As Hong Liu says, what Indonesians thought about China in the fifties and early sixties is revelatory of Indonesia, but also tells the history of China in the region and wider world.
