Taomo Zhou
Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), 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. in History from Cornell University. Her writings have appeared in publications such as The Journal of Asian Studies, Diplomatic History, The China Quarterly, The Critical Asian Studies, the journal Indonesia, and The Made in China Journal.
Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs and receives an Honourable Mention for the Henry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. It argues that migration and the political activism of the overseas Chinese were important historical forces in the making of the governmental relations between China and Indonesia during the Cold War. Grounded in multilingual archival research as well as oral history interviews with refugees, retired diplomats, former political prisoners and communist exiles, this project demonstrates how state-to-state diplomacy was influenced or even limited by transnational ethnic ties and the daily social and political practices of a minority group. This project also changes how we understand the regime change and mass violence in Indonesia in 1965-66.
Print length :318 pages
Language :English
Publisher :Cornell University Press
Publication date :October 15, 2019
Dimensions :5.98 x 0.88 x 9.02 inches
ISBN-10 :150173993X
ISBN-13 :978-1501739934
Review
This impressively researched study of Sino-Indonesian relations from 1945 to 1967 links three levels of diplomacy: state-to-state relations between China and Indonesia’s leftist leader Sukarno, party-to-party relations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Indonesian Communist Party, and the struggle between the rival regimes in Beijing and Taipei for influence over Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese community. Chinese and Indonesian archives show how Beijing and Jakarta cooperated in the fluid politics of the global anti-imperialist movement, siding in 1963–64 against what they viewed as a British imperialist plot to create Malaysia, a new state formed by the merger of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore.
The book dispels the myth that China directed the attempted coup in 1965 that led to the rise of the anticommunist strongman General Suharto, a break in Sino-Indonesian relations, and a massacre of suspected Communists, many of them ethnic Chinese. The Beijing-Taipei contest for influence in the ethnic Chinese community exacerbated the suspicion that the Chinese represented a fifth column. Throughout the turbulent politics of the time, Chinese Indonesians were victims of discrimination and violence, paradoxically accused both of capitalist exploitation and of pro-Beijing loyalties—suspicions that persist even today, when the two countries have full diplomatic and economic ties.
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Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.Migration in the Time of Revolution provides a fine-grained interpretation of the quadrilateral relationship between Indonesia, the Republic of China (ROC), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the so-called “Chinese diaspora” in Indonesia.
The book is organized chronologically into ten chapters of reason-able length focusing on the period between the last years of the Japanese inva-sion of Indonesia and the beginning of the New Order regime in the late 1960s. Chapter Ten discusses the experiences of Chinese Indonesians who settled in the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s, while the concluding chapter offers read-ers some updated insights.Meticulously researched and using a wide variety of sources, Taomo Zhou has done an excellent job unearthing and showcasing valuable material hith-erto underutilized or inaccessible. This is one of the key strengths and contri-butions of her book. Using material that is no longer available from the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, the book has clarified the nature of the PRC’s interest and knowledge of the Thirtieth September Movement (Chapter Eight). This is the highlight of the book but this achievement should not distract us from Zhou’s consistent use of equally underutilized material from archives elsewhere, for instance provincial archives in the PRC, the National Archives of Indonesia in Jakarta and Taipei’s Academia Historica.Other gems in the book include Zhou’s use of oral-history interviews (especially with intellectual and political figures who had been involved in or affected by events during the 1950s and 1960s), Chinese-language memoirs, fictional writings, and newspaper articles published in Indonesia.
hese ma-terials are not often used in the field of diplomatic history or in studies on Chinese Indonesians, and they add much-needed human interest and bal-ance to an account that is heavy on explicating high-level political and diplo-matic manoeuvres. This effort underscores Zhou’s earnest attempt to provide an evidence-based treatment of the convoluted inter-relationships between Chinese Indonesians and the Indonesian, ROC, and PRC governments that have had a huge impact on race relations and domestic politics within Indonesia. In addition, Zhou argues that her approach enables a “reinterpretation of dia-sporic politics, ethnic conflicts and international relations in an integrated and interactive framework” which allows her to “bridge the fields of diplomatic his-tory and migration studies” and write a “cross-Asian transnational social his-tory” (218)
On the whole, I find that the book’s “integrated and interactive” approach is convincing mainly in providing a nuanced account and analysis of key events during the period under discussion. There are, however, significant lapses in how some of the material is interpreted. Chapter Two for, example, contains a discussion of Ba Ren or Wang Renshu, who was the first ambassador of the PRC to Indonesia. Ba Ren is a key figure in the history of the Communist Party of China’s operations in Sumatra and is given a prominent place in the book’s narrative. However, Zhou’s discussion of Ba Ren seems unduly laudatory, which perhaps reflects her fascination with him, given that she appears to be persuaded by Ba Ren’s progressive politics and his passionate espousal of affec-tive and political affinity with Indonesia.Ba Ren’s politics and writings call for more incisive treatment. A lengthy quote extracted and translated from Ba Ren’s memoir reveals a strong sense of ethnocentric narcissism (42).
The quote stages Ba Ren’s imagined alienation from his own race and nationality as well as his “assimilation” into the imme-diate Indonesian indigenous community he was living with. Yet, these acts of “imagined community” with Indonesian nationhood takes place from a mani-fest position of unquestioned ethnic superiority as Ba Ren recycles racialized tropes of the indigenous native in Southeast Asia, romanticizing them as “idle,” “childlike,” “adorably awkward” and “naïve.” Meanwhile, Ba Ren’s colleague-turned-wife in Sumatra, Lei Derong, who, as Zhou informs us in a footnote, was herself a dedicated revolutionary and women’s rights activist, is a liminal figure in this account, hovering in the background, serving refreshments and cooking up a feast when they left Sumatra on the eve of the Japanese invasion.Zhou’s attempt to break new ground by merging the fields of diplomatic history and migration studies is noteworthy but not entirely successful. The book could have been more conscious of its privileging of the national scale of analysis and offer readers a more rigorous conceptual framework.
Key terms, particularly “migration,” which appears in the book’s title, as well as the book’s adoption of the term “overseas Chinese” and the equation of “overseas Chinese” with the problematic concept of “diaspora” require a more thorough discussion than that provided.Other than Chapter Ten, which contains an account of Chinese Indonesians who “returned” to live in the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s, the book is, strict-ly speaking, not about the experiences of “Chinese migrants” in foreign lands. The contents of Chapter Ten stand in ironic contrast to the absence of a definite temporal and spatial starting point in its account of Chinese Indonesian histo-ry in the earlier chapters. I note that an intuitive understanding of “migration”
