Then & Now | How overseas Chinese answered China’s call to return ‘home’, but couldn’t take the culture shock and left, many for Hong Kong

In the aftermath of the Communist assumption of power in 1949-50, and the dawn of a bright new day for China that the Nationalist collapse initially signified, an unusual development occurred. Thousands of Southeast Asia-born ethnic Chinese – most from newly independent Indonesia – moved to China, in response to the cultural pull of their ancestral homeland and premier Zhou Enlai’s call for them to “return” and help China “stand up” in the modern world.

Manufactured patriotism for an ancestral homeland that most Chinese families had left at least two generations earlier was an extraordinary Nationalist-era success that greatly benefited the early People’s Republic.

Providing Mandarin-language schools, qualified teachers and Sino-centric textbooks to Southeast Asian Chinese had been a Nationalist policy since the late 1920s, with the aim of creating a generation of overseas Chinese who identified with China as a nation-state, rather than a cultural idea.

Life in China, after Bali, was far from easy. The government went to considerable lengths to help new arrivals adapt; overseas Chinese shops were opened for them, where otherwise unobtainable foodstuffs to which they had been accustomed, such as fresh-ground coffee, were available at subsidised prices.

Privileged access to these shops some­times allowed the purchase of con­sumer items that were either unaffordable luxuries, or simply unavailable, to the average citizen. An occasional treat, Ah Sin recalled, was a box of Bee & Flower scented soap, and jars of Shanghai-made, solid-paste shampoo and perfumed hair oil. These luxuries were made to last for months.