On October 1, 1965, a coup took place in Indonesia when army units from the presidential palace guard abducted and later killed six senior anti-Communist generals. On the next day, Suharto, an important anti-communist figure in the army, launched an effective counterattack. During his rise to power, Suharto initiated a nation-wide anti-communist campaign, which escalated into one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century. Suharto and the Indonesian Army under him also fanned ethnic tensions and community violence. A significant portion of the ethnic Chinese population were either massacred, arrested and imprisoned, or directly pressured to leave the country. Under Suharto’s ensuing three-decade rule, Chinese ethnicity was identified with communism. A number of discriminatory laws were passed: the ethnic Chinese were given a special designation on their citizenship cards, and Chinese language education was banned.

What caused this tragedy? Was it an outgrowth of longstanding ethnic tensions between the Chinese and the indigenous population? Or was it the result of power politics during the Cold War? By combining the methodologies in the studies of transnational Chinese migrant networks and of diplomatic history, my dissertation reveals one of the previously overlooked causes of the tragedy in 1965. The Cold War in the Asia-Pacific region carried the Chinese Civil War beyond China’s borders. The pro-Chinese Communist and pro-Chinese Nationalist factions in Indonesia competed for the support of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, claiming that all ethnic Chinese owed their loyalty to China’s sole legitimate center: Beijing according to the Communists or Taipei according to the Nationalists. This continuous Beijing-versus-Taipei rivalry gave rise to revolutionary nationalism among the PRC-oriented ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and resulted in the Indonesians’ impressions of the Chinese as a disloyal and destabilizing ethnic minority. The worsened ethnic relations that resulted from this diasporic political activism contributed to the tragedy in 1965. By focusing on the interactions between migrants on the ground and top-level decision-makers, in contexts ranging from communal politics to international relations, my project ultimately reconceptualizes China’s experience in the Cold War as part of the People’s Republic’s transnational social history.