The overseas Chinese in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been seen as a resource for Beijing’s advancement of its interests abroad, despite the resistance of many Chinese diaspora to such characterizations. In 1965-1966, Indonesian Army general Suharto led a nation-wide anti-communist campaign, which escalated into one of the worst mass killings in the twentieth century. Suharto and his followers fanned racial tension by associating Chinese ethnicity with communism in their propaganda. As a result, many ordinary Chinese Indonesians—an ethnic minority who allegedly played an important economic role but with dubious national allegiance—were harassed, imprisoned, or expelled from the archipelago by implications. During its three-decade reign, the Suharto regime institutionalized discrimination against the Chinese based on the charge that they were used by Beijing for exporting communist revolution. This talk will investigate the veracity of Suharto regime’s accusation of the overseas Chinese as Beijing’s proxy. More broadly, it will explore the spaces where high diplomacy and everyday life experiences of the diaspora intersected in the mid-20th century and beyond.

About the Speaker: Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo received her B.A. from Peking University and Waseda University, M. Sc. with Distinction from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her writings have appeared in publications such as The China Quarterly, The Critical Asian Studies, the journal Indonesia, and The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines how two of the world's most populous countries interacted between 1945 and 1967, when the concept of citizenship was contested, and the boundaries of political mobilization were blurred. She is starting a new project on the historical transformation of Shenzhen, the first special economic zone of China.

About the Moderator: Lien-Hang Nguyen is the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University.

This event is hosted by NYSEAN and is co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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