Revolutionary Diplomacy and Diasporic Politics
Revolutionary Diplomacy and Diasporic Politics
This introductory chapter provides a background of the intertwined histories of the People's Republic of China and Indonesia. During the Cold War, the PRC and Indonesia were connected by two kinds of ties. On the state-to-state level, in the early 1960s Beijing and Jakarta forged a strategic alignment built on a shared past of anticolonial struggle and an anticipated future of independence from the Cold War superpowers. On the transnational level, even though China and Indonesia do not share geographical borders, the existence of 2.5 million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia—many of whom had economic influence but an unclear citizenship status—gave rise to a porous social frontier. This book then interweaves the evolution of diplomatic relations with the sociopolitical lives of the Chinese in Indonesia. The overseas Chinese were, and still are, an important but highly controversial resource for the PRC's advancement of political and economic interests abroad. However, the precise extent of the PRC's control over the diaspora remains obscure.
Keywords: People's Republic of China, Indonesia, Cold War, ethnic Chinese, citizenship, diplomatic relations
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