The Chinese who fled Sukarno’s Indonesia to build a new Bali under Mao
- A presidential decree 60 years ago sparked an exodus of Chinese from the newly independent country
- Tens of thousands were shipped to Mao-era China, where despite hardships they felt finally at home
It’s early Monday morning in a village in Quanzhou, Fujian province, and a group of Chinese men are sitting around playing dominoes. As they joke and smoke and bet small sums of money, there is little to distinguish their merry chatter from that going on in countless other villages across the country. Except for one small detail: they are talking to each other in Balinese.
Sixty years have passed since Sukarno implemented his infamous Presidential Decree No. 10 of 1959, which stripped “foreign citizens” of the right to run retail businesses in rural areas. But to some of the residents of Kampung Bali Nansan – like Tan Kok Jin, 71, and Wu Sui Thin, 80 – the memory is as fresh as yesterday.
Wu and Tan, like many others at Kampung Bali Nansan, had Indonesian citizenship, though that counted for little in the toxic atmosphere of 1950s Indonesia, when settling scores with the Chinese community – demonised in part for having enjoyed trading privileges under the Dutch colonial administration – was seen as politically expedient.
As the Chinese accounted for about 90 per cent of the country’s roughly 90,000 listed foreign businesses, Sukarno’s decree was widely seen as ethnically charged. While, technically, it referred only to “foreign citizens”, in practice it affected all ethnic Chinese, including those with Indonesian citizenship.