Chinese: valued but not loved

The lunar new year, a time of ostentatious banqueting and open displays of wealth, was supposed to mark the celebration of prosperity and cementation of family ties throughout the Chinese world. The rejoicing is normally justified - for the Chinese, though few in number, dominate the private-sector economies of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Instead, gripped by Asia's deepest financial crisis in modern times, the ethnic Chinese in many countries are remembering that they are valued, but not loved, and that they may be turned on as scapegoats in times of hardship.

Last week the mobs gathered outside stores in several coastal towns on the Indonesian island of Java. They were furious because the price of kerosene had trebled and the costs of basic foodstuffs were rising. Although the financial crisis was mainly to blame, the crowds, often aroused by fiery Muslim preachers, accused the Chinese of exploitation. Chinese make up only about 3 percent of Indonesia's 200m people but 70 percent of the country's wealth is in their hands.

Indonesian troops were rushed to the towns but arrived too late to stop 26 stores, all Chinese-owned, being smashed and plundered. Some shopowners had spray-painted "Muslim" on their walls in a vain effort to save their premises, for although most remain Buddhist or Christian, a few Chinese have converted to Islam. "All the foodstuffs were looted," said a local official.

A placard carried in one demonstration read: "Destroy the Chinese."

President Suharto, mindful of the tensions among 600 ethnic groups in his vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, beseeched his people to abide by the constitution, which emphasises religious and racial harmony.

But as Indonesia sinks deeper into recession, its currency down by 80 percent against the American dollar and most of its companies technically bankrupt, many rich Chinese have decided not to take any chances. A few ethnic Chinese made huge fortunes in alliance with the Suharto family, and their conglomerates took on much of the $65 billion debt that has demolished the rupiah.

Some of the rich are said to have provisioned their yachts for the 1 1/2 -day voyage north to Singapore, in case they have to make a run for their lives. Others, like a number of nervous western expatriates, are putting their faith in first-class open-dated air tickets to Hong Kong or Bangkok.

All are anxious to save their wealth, by exporting it if possible. "Business is great for banks renting out safe-deposit boxes in Singapore," said an investment banker in the city-state. An exodus would be a nightmare for Singapore, itself a trading entrepôt dominated by Chinese. "A new wave of boat people, all ethnic Chinese - that's the last thing they want," said a veteran businessman in Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's elder statesman, once reflected on how fragile is the balance between the 77 percent of its people who are Chinese and the Malays and Indians. "It could become a Beirut with stupid policies," he said. "You ill-treat the minority. You interfere with their religion. You do not give them a chance to advance in life. Then you will find plastic explosives in the underground and in big buildings."

If even the suggestion of strife seems unimaginable in stable Singapore, which hums along like a tropical Geneva, the memories of violence among people of Lee's generation are all too real.

Relations between the Chinese and the majority peoples in southeast Asia have rarely been tranquil. After Mao's revolution in 1949, the region's Chinese came to be seen as agents of communist subversion.

In Malaysia, British troops fought a ruthless campaign from 1948 to 1960 to suppress insurgency led by Chinese guerrillas. During the Vietnam war, the ethnic Chinese in Saigon were often identified with the communist north, only to take to the boats in huge numbers after "liberation" when many of their enterprises were shut down.

In Thailand and Burma, Chinese merchants kept a low profile and paid off generals and politicians with generosity. In the Philippines, ethnic Chinese intoxicated by Maoism were blamed for inspiring a decades-long communist guerrilla campaign. And when Suharto came to power during Indonesia's "year of living dangerously" from 1965 to 1966, more than half a million alleged communists, mainly Chinese, were massacred.

An echo of those times came last week when Indonesian authorities called in Sofyan Wanandi, a fabulously wealthy Chinese businessman, for questioning over a bomb blast. An urbane, tennis and golf-playing tycoon who was once a student radical, Wanandi receives visitors in a colonial-era mansion and is not afraid to criticise the regime even though he has prospered alongside it.

He said last year that Suharto faced "a crisis of credibility".

Indonesia's shadowy security services claimed Wanandi's name had been found in an e-mail message at a bomb-maker's hideout. There was no evidence to connect him with subversion and he was released after questioning.

But many businessmen detected a sinister note in the identification of so prominent a Chinese with suggestions of disloyalty. They observed that only a few days earlier, senior army officers had grumbled that none of the Chinese tycoons had joined a "love the rupiah" campaign, in which wealthy Indonesians came forward to swap dollars for rupiah in a conspicuous, but financially insignificant, show of patriotism.

Since the 1960s, the Indonesian Chinese, like their compatriots elsewhere, have learnt to prosper while staying carefully in the background. Racism, religious bigotry and suspicions of divided loyalties all seem like timebombs under Chinese communities. Rich Chinese in Manila live in fear of kidnapping for ransom, after a series of such crimes which the Filipino police seem curiously unable to solve.

It is a sign that Chinese wealth, not Chinese subversion, is now the cause of their woes. But it is hard to forget the comment of an Indonesian official to an American writer who called on him recently to research a book on the subject. "The Chinese," said the official blandly, "are like locusts."

Published in the Sunday Times, London. February 1, 1998