The overseas Chinese are an important but highly controversial resource for Beijing’s advancement of its interests abroad. In Indonesia, the Suharto regime imposed institutionalized discrimination against the Chinese minority based on charges that they were used by Beijing for exporting communist revolution. This talk investigates the veracity of these accusations and the interconnectedness between diplomacy and the life experiences of the diaspora.
Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the author of Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019). Her writings have also appeared in publications such as The China Quarterly, The Critical Asian Studies, the journal Indonesia, and The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China. Having grown up in Shenzhen, Taomo is starting a new research project on the first special economic zone of China.