China's alliance with Indonesia in the mid-sixties appeared to be a spectacular achievement of diplomatic strategy, yet it became a major foreign policy disaster for China. To explore this turn-about, Professor Mozingo offers a persuasive analysis of the competing forces that shaped Beijing's policy towards Jakarta and the factors that ultimately led to its downfall. He explains how and why Chinese policy in Indonesia shifted dramatically from hostility to peaceful coexistence and back again to hostility. "Although considerations of global strategy predominantly influenced the design and execution of that policy," he writes, "the decisive factor affecting the outcome of the Sino-Indonesian relationship consistently proved to be the domestic political processes in Indonesia, over which Beijing had little or no control." In the end, China was unable to resolve the contradiction between considerations of realpolitik and of its own revolutionary ethos. He argues that this same contradiction is responsible for the highly ambivalent attitude that Beijing has displayed in its relations with other non-communist Arfo-Asian countries since 1949. Through this informed analysis of the Sino-Indonesian relationship, now brought back to life as a member of Equinox Publishing's Classic Indonesia series, Professor Mozingo has clarified the larger pattern of China's evolving diplomatic strategy in the Third World before the Cultural Revolution. DAVID MOZINGO is Professor of Government and Director, International Relations of East Asia Project, at Cornell University. A graduate of the University of California, Loa Angeles, he received his MA and PhD degrees there. He was formerly a staff member of the Rand Corporation, and Director, China-Japan Program, at Cornell University.

Indonesia broke off relations with China in 1967 and resumed them only in 1990. Rizal Sukma asks why. His answers shed light on Indonesia's foreign policy, the nature of the New Order's domestic politics, the mixed functions of diplomatic ties, the legitimacy of the new regime, and the role of President Suharto. Rizal Sukma argues that the matter of Indonesia restoring diplomatic ties with China is best understood in terms of the efforts made by the military-based New Order government to sustain its political legitimacy. The analysis in this book proves that an absence as well as a presence of diplomatic relations may advance not only the external but the domestic interests of an incumbent government. This is the first major study on Indonesia and China's diplomatic relations under the New Order government. It will be illuminating for research students and lecturers in international politics, international relations, policy making and diplomacy

This book analyses the relations between Indonesia and China in the regional dynamics of Southeast Asia. The rising China has influenced global and regional constellations, and also has direct impacts for Indonesia. While this fact should be viewed as an opportunity that needs to be fully utilised for the benefit of national development of Indonesia, we should also prepare for the threats embedded in this development, especially from the service and labour sectors. As such, this book suggests that equal positions in relations between Indonesia and China are absolutely necessary, since both countries need each other in their efforts to maintain the continuity of their development. It also argues that to further strengthen its position in relation to China in the future, Indonesia's diplomacy requires an integrated grand design that supports the creation of economic and political power in the face of the emergence of China's economic and military power.

This book examines how the Indonesian Chinese who were born after 1966 negotiate meanings about their culture and identity through their collective memory of growing up in a restrictive media environment that specifically curtailed Chinese language and culture. The restrictive media environment was the result of a series of policies administered during the Suharto era (1965-1998). According to the regulations, the Indonesian government closed all Chinese-language schools and prohibited the use of Chinese characters in public places, the import of Chinese-language publications, and all public forms and expressions of Chinese culture. In the past century, and particularly in the past decade, much attention has been given to China and its rising status as a world economic power. Scholarship on overseas Chinese has also shed light on their relationship with their 'mythic homeland', China. In their work, scholars discovered that the Chinese of Southeast Asia have created a prominent economic, political, and cultural presence in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In the 1960s, scholars such as George Kahin, Ruth McVey, and Benedict Anderson were drawn to the political upheavals in Indonesia and the various roles that the Chinese of Indonesia have played in the economic, political, and cultural arenas of their country. In later years, Charles Coppel and Leo Suryadinata have published extensively on various aspects of the Chinese in Indonesia, such as their religious affiliations and education. Despite the considerable attention given to the Chinese of Indonesia, scholars have not specifically studied, through the lens of the media, how a certain group of Chinese Indonesians grew up in a restrictive media and cultural environment during the 33 years when Indonesia was ruled by Suharto. This book takes the first step in examining this generation's collective memory of growing up in a state-controlled environment that has had a significant impact on their identity formation, maintenance, and the (re)negotiation of 'Chineseness' in their everyday lives. This book will appeal especially to media, cultural studies, and Southeast Asian studies scholars, researchers, and students.

Migration in the Time of Revolution explores the complex relationship between China and Indonesia from 1945 to 1967, during a period when citizenship, identity, and political loyalty were in flux. Taomo Zhou examines the experiences of migrants, including youths seeking an ancestral homeland they had never seen and economic refugees whose skills were unwelcome in a socialist state. Zhou argues that these migrants played an active role in shaping the diplomatic relations between Beijing and Jakarta, rather than being passive subjects of historical forces. By using newly declassified documents and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution demonstrates how the actions and decisions of ethnic Chinese migrants were crucial in the development of post-war relations between China and Indonesia. By integrating diplomatic history with migration studies, Taomo Zhou provides a nuanced understanding of how ordinary people's lives intersected with broader political processes in Asia, offering a fresh perspective on the Cold War's social dynamics.

The disintegration of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998 and the fall of Soeharto put an end to the crude forms of centralised authoritarianism and economic protectionism that allowed large Chinese conglomerates to dom- inate Indonesia's private sector. Contrary to all expectations, most of the major capitalist groups, though damaged considerably by the Asian Crisis, managed to cope with the ensuing monumental political and economic changes, and now thrive again albeit within a new democratic environment. In this book Christian Chua assesses the state of capital before, during, and after the financial and political crisis of 1997/1998 and analyses the changing relationships between business and the state in Indonesia. Using a distinct perspective that combines cultural and structural approaches on Chinese big business with exclusive material derived from interviews with some of Indonesia’s major business leaders, Chua identifies the strategies employed by tycoons to adapt their corporations to the post-authoritarian regime and provides a unique insight into how state-business relationships in Indonesia have evolved since the crisis. Chinese Big Business in Indonesia is the first major analysis of capital in Indonesia since the fall of Soeharto, and will be of interest to graduate students and scholars of political economy, political sociology, economics and business administration as well as to practitioners having to do with Southeast Asian business and politics.