The Pao An Tui in Medan A Chinese Security Force in Dutch Occupied Indonesia, 1945‐1948 August, 20, 2013 Master Thesis Research Master Programme Modern History Utrecht University Supervisor: Dr. Remco Raben Anne van der Veer 3372022 Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 2 The Pao An Tui in Medan................................................................................................................ 3 Structure......................................................................................................................................... 4 1. Chinese leadership before World War II......................................................................................... 8 State policy regarding the Chinese minority................................................................................... 8 The Chinese leader as intermediary between the state and the community .............................. 11 The political orientation of the Chinese community .................................................................... 14 2. The Indonesian revolution and the position of the Chinese......................................................... 17 Revolution..................................................................................................................................... 17 Chinese responses ........................................................................................................................ 19 Policy............................................................................................................................................. 20 3. Defending the Chinese community of Medan.............................................................................. 25 Revolution and Allied occupation in Sumatra’s East Coast .......................................................... 25 Organizing self‐defense ................................................................................................................ 28 The Pao An Tui as community organization ................................................................................. 33 4. The Pao An Tui as the Chinese community’s own security force ................................................. 38 Under Dutch command ................................................................................................................ 38 Maintaining order in the Chinese Community ............................................................................. 40 Overseas Chinese nationalism ...................................................................................................... 44 Following in the footsteps of the Chinese officers ....................................................................... 46 5. Disbanding the Pao An Tui............................................................................................................ 48 Obstacles to the final dissolution ................................................................................................. 48 Disbanding the Pao An Tui............................................................................................................ 50 The demise of the Pao An Tui as key community organization .................................................... 52 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 56 Bibliography...................................................................................................................................... 60 Primary sources ............................................................................................................................ 60 Literature ...................................................................................................................................... 60 1 Introduction The Indonesian revolution of 1945‐1949 has figured large in the historiography of Indonesia. The struggle for national independence undeniably marked the watershed between Dutch colonial rule and post‐colonial state‐building, hence its major historical significance. More than siX decades after the Netherlands recognized Indonesia’s independence most of the major themes have received due attention. The story has been told from every binary imaginable: Indonesian and Dutch perspectives, the national level and the regional dynamics, elite ideology and popular participation, national unity and ethnic diversity. One issue however has remained largely undereXplored, namely the role and political activities of the ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia during the revolution. The Chinese minority represented roughly 2.5 percent of the total population in the 1940s.1 Despite their relatively small number, their position is very relevant in questions of citizenship and identity in the development of an independent Indonesian nation‐state. Under colonial rule, Dutch policy gave the Chinese the distinct status of ‘Foreign Orientals’ (Vreemde Oosterlingen, also including Arabs and Indians) which set them apart from both the Europeans and native subjects (Inlanders). Foreign Orientals were given discriminatory but preferential treatment. During the chaotic and often violent course of the revolution widespread resentment among the former inlanders against Chinese burst out into the open. The Chinese became the targets of systematic acts of revenge, largely because they were associated with wealth and opportunistic collaboration with the Dutch. The young Indonesian Republic was barely capable to protect the Chinese from attacks of a myriad of irregular troops and criminal gangs that operated under the flag of the revolution, but were by no means under control of the official Republican army. Under these pressures, the Chinese began to form their own self‐defense organizations in Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan.2 Mary Somers‐ Heidhues offered a first eXamination into the Chinese self‐defense organizations in her unpublished Ph.D. dissertation Peranakan Chinese Politics in Indonesia of 1965. She called attention to their significance for the already problematic relationship between the Chinese and Indonesians by posing that ‘fear of the Indonesians became a moving force for the Chinese (...)’ and that when they formed their own self‐defense organization, the Pao An Tui ‘appeared to the Indonesians that the Chinese were fighting alongside the Dutch.’3 By eXamining the Pao An Tui, Somers‐Heidhues is able to account for the active participation of the Chinese in the Indonesian revolution and thereby offers an alternative approach to challenge the conventional perspective on the role of the Chinese in the struggle between the Dutch and the Indonesians, in which the Chinese are mainly treated as passive targets of anti‐Chinese violence from the Indonesian side. Somers‐Heidhues goes beyond the mere victimization of the Chinese and traces 1 G. William Skinner, ‘The Chinese Minority,’ in: Ruth McVey (ed.), Indonesia (New Haven, 1963) 97‐117, 97. 2 Mary F. Somers‐Heidhues, ‘Citizenship and Identity: Ethnic Chinese and the Indonesian Revolution,’ in: Jennifer W. Cushman and Wang Gungwu (eds.), Changing identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II (Hong Kong, 1988) 115‐138, 125. 3 Mary F. Somers‐Heidhues, Peranakan Chinese Politics in Indonesia (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, 1965). This quote is from her Interim Report on Peranakan Chinese Politics (Ithaca 1964) 50. 2 how the Chinese did indeed participate by actively responding to the violent attacks in the organized effort of establishing self‐defense units.4 The Pao An Tui in Medan In Medan, the northern Sumatran city with a large Chinese population, the local Pao An Tui group was particularly notorious for its cooperation with the Dutch. But the PAT was established already in December 1946, before the Dutch returned to Medan to reinstall their government and take over the military command from the British forces. The Chinese in Medan had formed the PAT on their own initiative and it was only after the Dutch resumed control that the PAT allied itself with the Dutch military. By the time the Dutch returned, in the fall of 1946, the PAT had developed into a full‐blown military organization that eXhibited remarkable military prowess in confronting the Indonesian people’s militias that threatened to harm the Chinese. Due to the PAT’s effectiveness in protecting the Chinese community, the Dutch military enlisted the PAT to assist the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands‐Indisch Leger, KNIL) in the defense of Medan. Helpful though the PAT was to the Dutch military, the PAT’s cooperative attitude was only one side of the coin. The other side was that the PAT enjoyed considerable autonomy within the Chinese community and manifested itself as a private force which served the interests of the Chinese. The PAT developed into a police force as it appropriated the typical duties of the police and thereby even managed to supersede the position of the official Dutch police within the community. The PAT played a key role in the maintenance of law and order in the community as it developed into the foremost security force in the Chinese district. But since the Dutch did not have the PAT fully under their control, even though the corps served under Dutch military command, the PAT could carry out the maintenance of