ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, Indonesia has witnessed the booming of Mandarin schools in its major urban settings. This emerging phenomenon is especially obvious among Chinese-Indonesian parents who were born after the 1966 ban on communism in Indonesia. Children aged 6–13 years are sent to modern Mandarin-based international schools that use not only the Indonesian language as the instructional language, but, more importantly, Mandarin and English as well. This cultural trend in contemporary Indonesia has raised a question: are we seeing the reassertion of ‘Chineseness’ among Chinese-Indonesians, which is oriented towards the ‘ancestral homeland’ (mainland China), or is it based more on a cosmopolitan urban outlook, which does not consider cultural boundaries as an essential part of their identity markers? This paper seeks to address this issue based on field research conducted in two of the largest cities on Java Island, the primary island of Indonesia. The concepts of Chineseness and cosmopolitanism developed by Ien Ang and other Chinese diaspora scholars will be used as the main framework to discuss the issue. This paper argues that the kind of ‘Chineseness’ constructed by contemporary Chinese-Indonesian identity tends to be less closely related to the essentialist concept of ‘recinicization’ but more closely related to a fluid idea of cosmopolitanism, which, in turn, helps redefine nationalism in the specific Chinese-Indonesian context.
