An Ethnic Chinese Christian, Breaking Barriers in Indonesia
By JOE COCHRANE

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Jakarta, the sprawling Indonesian megacity of 10 million people, has a new governor with a difference.

It’s not just Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s hard-charging style that sets him apart from his predecessors. It’s also the fact that he is Christian and ethnic Chinese, and is improbably running the capital of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

Mr. Basuki, a 48-year-old Protestant whose grandfather was a tin miner from Guangzhou, China, was sworn in Wednesday at the State Palace by President Joko Widodo.

None of Jakarta’s previous governors have been Christian or of Chinese ancestry, except for one who served briefly as an appointee half a century ago (like Mr. Basuki, he was both). And despite Indonesia’s history of discrimination — and, at times, savage violence — against ethnic Chinese, Mr. Basuki says he considers neither his faith nor his ethnicity to be a political handicap.

“When people told me ‘the Chinese are a minority,’ my father would say to tell them that we are more patriotic,” Mr. Basuki said in a recent interview. “If one day Indonesia is occupied by a foreign country, my father said he would be in front of the front line to fight for our independence again.”

Mr. Basuki was Jakarta’s deputy governor under Mr. Joko, who was elected president in July, and he has run the city for much of this year in Mr. Joko’s absence. Like Mr. Joko, Mr. Basuki is one of a small but growing group of political upstarts who gained national attention for running clean, effective local governments, in a country where corruption has long been a fact of life.

Known for being brash and speaking bluntly, Mr. Basuki — popularly known as Ahok — is very different from the soft-spoken Javanese politicians the capital is used to. He began turning heads just weeks after he and Mr. Joko took office in 2012, when videos of Mr. Basuki berating civil servants for incompetence appeared on YouTube.

Since then, he has added to his confrontational reputation by closing the capital’s most notorious nightclub after an off-duty police officer died there of a drug overdose, and by evicting thousands of illegal street vendors who had been compounding Jakarta’s chronic traffic problems.

“If you want to live in comfort, you have to get everything in order,” Mr. Basuki said. “And if you want to put everything in order, you have to have law enforcement.”

Mr. Basuki’s rise is a mark of the gains made by ethnic Chinese politicians since Indonesia’s transition to democracy in 1999 — particularly since direct elections were implemented at all levels of government, including local offices that were once filled by appointment.

“While there were no actual political restrictions, for all intent and purposes, Chinese were restricted from the public domain for decades,” said Kevin Evans, founder of Pemilu Asia, an Indonesian firm that collects political data. “With direct elections of district chiefs, mayors and lawmakers at the provincial level, ethnic Chinese are running and winning, and winning in districts where the Chinese population is a small minority.”

Though Chinese-Indonesians make up just over 1 percent of the vast Indonesian archipelago’s population, historically they have tended to wield economic clout beyond their numbers, which has often led to resentment. For decades, they were subjected to discriminatory laws and regulations.

Anti-Chinese sentiment exploded into rioting in cities across Indonesia in 1998, amid protests against then-President Suharto’s authoritarian rule. In Jakarta, more than a thousand people were killed in the rioting, more than 150 women were raped and entire blocks in the Chinatown district were razed.

While some affluent Chinese families fled to neighboring Singapore after the riots, Mr. Basuki’s family stayed. “We are descendants of China, but our motherland is Indonesia,” he said.

A former mining consultant, Mr. Basuki first ran for office in 2005, winning a local election on his native island of Belitung, off the southeast coast of Sumatra, in a district where 93 percent of the voters were Muslim. “I asked them why they wanted me to run, because I am of Chinese descent and a Christian,” he recalled of the local residents who approached him. “They said, ‘We don’t care — we know who you are. We know your character.’ ”

Bambang Harymurti, who was an editor in chief of Tempo magazine, a leading Indonesian newsweekly, said that some Indonesians, particularly in Jakarta’s more affluent circles, have a phobia about Chinese-Indonesians’ growing participation in high-level politics.

“The indigenous Indonesians may have the numbers, but Chinese dominate the economy,” Mr. Bambang said. “So these people are thinking, ‘Will they control the politics with Ahok as governor?’ ”

Opponents made Mr. Basuki’s ethnicity and religion an issue during Jakarta’s 2012 gubernatorial race, when he was Mr. Joko’s running mate. And when Mr. Joko, a Muslim, ran for president, he was subjected to a rumor campaign that characterized him as an ethnic-Chinese Christian.

Still, the electorate has evolved, said Philips J. Vermonte, head of the department of politics and international relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, noting that the ethnicity-based attacks against Mr. Basuki and Mr. Joko were unsuccessful.

Mr. Basuki’s “just get it done” attitude has been applauded by many Jakartans, but he has critics. Last month, members of the hard-line Islamic Defenders Front clashed with the police outside the Jakarta City Council and City Hall buildings as they protested Mr. Basuki’s pending swearing-in, saying that a non-Muslim should not be governor.

Nonetheless, he is preparing to move into the colonial-style governor’s office on the southern end of Jakarta’s National Monument Park, opposite the State Palace. He is already thinking about what’s next.

“I think it’s easier to solve national problems like corruption if you are a president than as a governor,” Mr. Basuki said. “Who knows? I’d only need to move just across the park.”

華裔鍾萬學 雅加達的鐵腕省長

當眾人目光焦點放在印尼新總統佐科威將推型的新政時，雅加達這個擁有1,000萬人口、蔓延無際的超大城市，也有了一個與過往人物不同的新省長鍾萬學（Basuki Tjahaja Purnama）。

紐約時報報導，祖父是來自大陸廣州錫礦礦工的鍾萬學，是近50年來雅加達省第一位基督徒暨華裔省長，由他來掌管全球人口最多的穆斯林國家首都，令人難以置信。他也是佐科威當年競選省長時的副手。

在鍾萬學之前的雅加達省長，除了50年前有一位短暫在職的人之外、全都不是基督徒或華裔。儘管印尼過去都有歧視、偶爾會暴力對抗華裔的歷史，但鍾萬學認為他的信念或種族不會成為他的政治阻礙。

鍾萬學說，當人們跟他說華裔是少數族群時，他的父親都會回答，這些華裔族群更愛國，如果有一天印尼被外國占領，他的父親會挺身而出、站上前線，為印尼再度獨立而戰。

此外，人稱「阿學」（Ahok）的鍾萬學向來以直言著稱，與雅加達慣有的言辭溫和的爪哇政治人物截然不同。他2012年和當時的雅加達省長佐科威上任幾周後，YouTube就流出他嚴斥公務員的影片，在那之後，他又鐵腕關閉一家惡名昭彰的夜店，為他贏得勇於對抗的聲譽。

鍾萬學說，如果你想安心過生活，就要一切按秩序來，如果想讓一切按秩序來，就得執行法律。鍾萬學的崛起，也象徵華裔政治人士自從印尼從1999年向民主制度過渡以來取得大幅進展。

印尼Pemilu亞洲公司的創始人艾萬斯（Kevin Evans）說，當局雖然沒有設定嚴格的政治限制，但不管是出於什麼意圖和目的，華裔數十年來一直難以進入公職領域。華裔印尼人人口僅占總人口的逾1%，但卻都會發揮不符合人數比率的廣大經濟影響力，這也常在印尼招來憤怒。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/asia/an-ethnic-chinese-christian-breaking-barriers-in-indonesia.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/asia-pacific/20141125/c25jakarta/zh-hant/

2014-12-22．經濟日報．A8．國際．編譯 簡國帆