Instrumentalization of the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject South Asian Studies, South-Eastern Asian Studies, grade: 1, University of Vienna (Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften), course: Chinese Migration, language: English, abstract: This paper focuses the Chinese of Indonesia, that group that is assumed to dominate the economy as well as to be unassimilable (Oetomo 1989). In the course of this essay, the follwing thesis will be examined: only because of the political and economic intrumentalization by the Dutch colonial government, the Chinese migrants became the so-called seperated 'ethnic Chinese minority group' and stayed in this condition as a result of the independent Indonesian state's policy. The first part of this paper presents an explanation of the term 'migration' and introduces an overview of migration research and the history of migration to South East Asia. While the second part discusses the theoretical premisis of the construction of an ethnical minority, the third part reassess the drawn conclusion on the case of the Chinese in Indonesia. A summary of the results are given in the conclusion.