The Chinese Associations And Their Leaders In Medan, Indonesia Since The 1980s

This dissertation looks at the Chinese community of Medan in the Province of North Sumatra, Indonesia, focusing on the Chinese associations and their leaderships. The author conducted field interviews in Medan and collected a number of first-hand data about the Chinese associations that constitute a very important basis for this study.With the gradual relaxation of the Suharto government's restriction policy towards the Chinese in Indonesia since the 1980s, the Chinese associations in Indonesia started to revive slowly. In 1998, the Suharto government stepped down for its failure to deal with the financial crisis and social unrest. This accelerated the process of democratization in Indonesia. Meanwhile, the Chinese associations gained the opportunity to develop. Those old Chinese associations have changed their names and functions in order to adapt to the new social environment in Indonesia, and the new-born Chinese associations are different from the former completely. In this study, the author tries to answer the following questions: Why do the Chinese need to reorganize their associations after they experienced long-time cultural assimilation and prohibition of association, in particular, when the Chinese society has been too weakened to establish the associations after a series of anti-Chinese movements? What are the purpose and significance of reorganizing the Chinese community? What change did the new-born associations have in their structure and function? What trait do the leaders of the Chinese associations have? How are they classified? What are the leaders' personal relationships in the networks of various associations? What are the relations between the Chinese community, the Chinese associations, and their leaders? What characteristic do Medan's Chinese associations and their leaders have in comparison with those in other regions of Indonesia?The dissertation is divided into six chapters with a summary.Chapter One explains the reason for research, the theory and methods of research, the significance of the study, and the definition and explanation of relevant conceptions.Chapter Two gives a retrospect of previous research and makes some comments on them.Chapter Three analyses the evolution of the Chinese society in Indonesia and then in Medan. It pointes out that the Chinese in Medan, as a part of the Indonesian Chinese, developed its own special characteristic, by maintaining a common feature of the Chinese associations in Indonesia. The dissertation focuses on its uniqueness.Chapter Four discusses the development of the Chinese associations in Medan from the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and describes the new features of their structure and function. It argues that Chinese associations are advancing with the times.Chapter Five focuses on the types of Chinese association's leaders, their historical and geographical features, as well as their personal relationships. The "internal relations" and "external relations" are used to describe how the leaders of the associations build a series of relationships and take advantage of them.Chapter Six discourses the interaction of the Chinese community, the Chinese associations, and their leaders in Medan in the past and at present, and makes a prediction about its future. In addition, some questions worthy of exploring further are put forward.So far there is no systematical study on the Chinese community in Medan, and therefore this dissertation is to make a contribution on this subject.