Category: Research

While reading on colonial-era ethnic Chinese businesses in Java, I came across a fascinating case study of one NV Handelmaatschappij Kwik Hoo Tong, founded by a family named Kwik who hailed originally from Taiwan.

About the time when the Kwiks registered their trading society in Solo, Japan and China went to war, which resulted in Japan’s colonisation of Taiwan in 1895. This event would have a large impact on the brothers’ legal status in the Indies. After concluding a Treaty of Trade and Navigation in 1896, the Netherlands and Japan recognised each other as most favoured nations, and subsequently the Tokyo government pressed the Dutch to accord its migrants in their colonies the same legal status as Europeans. In 1899, Japanese citizens in the Indies acquired European status; this ruling applied not only to migrants from Japan proper, but also to inhabitants of its colonies. Although many Taiwanese Chinese in the Indies resented the Japanese takeover of their homeland, they were quick to recognise the advantages of registering as Japanese in the Dutch colony.

That means that, under Dutch law, ethnic Chinese who happened to be born in what later became a colony of Japan were, legally, Europeans. Or at least, they could choose to be treated for legal and business purposes as Europeans. And at least one of the Kwik brothers did just this, which allowed him to have access to Dutch financial capital, something which would have been illegal for a non-European.

This is a neat parallel for recent research being done here at Cornell about ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and post-independence citizenship. It turns out that after the 1955 citizenship treaty between China and Indonesia, a substantial number of Chinese families strategically chose to divide themselves by nationality: one child would choose Indonesian citizenship, another Chinese citizenship, as a way to hedge their bets.

My colleague Sharon Poczter and I have just completed a new paper on the legacies of authoritarian rule in Indonesia. Here is the abstract.

Democratization has fundamentally changed the formal institutional structure of Indonesian politics, but a wealth of contemporary research has demonstrated that the informal mechanisms of power and influence have survived the transition. This paper uses a unique, hand-collected dataset of information on Indonesia’ political elites over the democratic transition to empirically catalogue the changes and continuities in Indonesian politics since democratization. Our results provide quantitative evidence for substantial change in Indonesia’s political economy over the past half century, with the simultaneous rise of capital and decline of military and the state as avenues to political power at the national level. Our evidence also suggests that the origins of this transition pre-date democratization itself.

There are lots of interesting findings, but to me, the most significant one is the last sentence.

Marc Bellemare would call this a “determinants of…” paper. He’s right. There is a danger with a paper such as this:

The issue with “determinants” papers is that they put the ox before the cart, i.e., the author decided to have a bit of fun playing with data, found some interesting partial correlations, and then retro-fitted a story to fit the facts.

This is not exactly the case here. Our findings about the rise of capital really are consistent with a long line of research on Indonesia’s political economy. The real problem would have emerged if our data had not been consistent with that established interpretation of Indonesian politics. What story would we have told then?

I also see a difference between a partial correlation between a policy outcome and covariate that is used to inform policy analysis—Marc’s worry—and a partial correlation between two socioeconomic variables that used to describe the variation that we observe in a particular social setting. As we are doing the latter, we heed Marc’s advice in describing the limitations of our findings, and I think that that should suffice for all but the most obstreperous reviewers.