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PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2016.
The Transcultural Edge, curated by Ilaria Vanni Accarigi.
© 2016 [Frans Ari Prasetyo]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4789.

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ISSN: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal.

City Performance: Chinese New Year in West Kalimantan

Frans Ari Prasetyo, Bandung Institute of Technology

The tight state control over Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese communities under President

Suharto’s New Order (1966–1998) resulted in the political, social and cultural exclusion

of those communities for many decades. In practice the New Order era saw the

Indonesian government discriminate overtly against many of the country’s non-

indigenous populations, but it targeted the Chinese in particular. Certain businesses

were closed to Chinese Indonesians, there was a quota for Chinese Indonesians in

entering state universities, and there were restrictions on Chinese Indonesians joining

the civil service. With the collapse of the New Order in 1998 and the subsequent

lessening of state control over all Indonesian social and ethnic groups, attempts have

been made to re-establish long-suppressed Chinese cultural formations and practices in

Indonesia.

A case in point is the celebration of Chinese New Year, which had been banned since

the passing of Order No 14/1967 by President Suharto, the ban also coinciding with the

breaking off of diplomatic relations with China. Following the rapprochement between

Indonesia and China at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-

first, the Indonesian Government has taken extraordinary steps to bring about better

conditions for the country’s ethnic Chinese populations.

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Given this context, it is important to establish a historical sense of the changing

receptions and status of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia since the collapse of the Suharto

regime in 1998. The subsequent reformation of the Indonesian political system after the

Suharto era saw an immediate lessening of state control over ethnic Chinese

communities, and other groups. The first post-Suharto era President, Bacharuddin Jusuf

Habibie (1998–1999), issued a presidential decision that the division between pribumi

(so-called Indigenous Indonesians) and non-pribumi (non-Indigenous Indonesians,

including the country’s communities of Chinese descent) be abolished. Attempts have

been made since then to re-establish or resuscitate long-suppressed ethnic and cultural

Chinese practices in Indonesia. Consequently, alternative discourses on identity have

emerged, ranging from political and religious identifications to those of a more

sociocultural nature.

The status of Chinese Indonesians began to change dramatically when the

discriminatory distinction between pribumi and non-pribumi Indonesians was nullified

formally by President Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as ‘Gus Dur,’ 1999–

2001) in 2000 via government decree number 6/2000. This process was further

solidified with the issuing of the anti-racial discrimination law number 12/2006 on

citizenship. In 2002, President Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001–2004) designated Chinese

New Year—Cap Go Meh or Imlek in local idiom—as a national public holiday. Her

declaration of Imlek as a public holiday followed her predecessor Gus Dur’s decision to

make Chinese New Year an ‘optional holiday’ in 2001.

Since the end of the prohibition of Chinese New Year celebrations, the night sky of

towns and cities across Indonesia has been illuminated with fireworks on the eve of

Chinese New Year. Most notably, the traditional street parades and accompanying

festival on the fifteenth day of the New Year have been growing in size in a number of

West Kalimantan towns, in particular in Singkawang, a city on the northwestern coast

of the province of West Kalimantan (Borneo), with a population just under 200,000, the

majority of Chinese descent. Singkawang is the only Indonesian city to have a Chinese

majority. The Chinese communities in Singkawang, as with Chinese communities the

world over, celebrate the advent of the lunar new year during which family reunions,

and visits among family and friends, renew communal bonds. The night was

traditionally marked by the firing of crackers and ritual processions intended to scare

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Map 1: Wiki commons, Indonesia regions map for use on Wikivoyage, Indonesian version, March 2014,
Author Peter Fitzgerald, Indonesian translation by Bennylin.

Map 2: West Kalimantan Province. Source: http://www.divrekalbar.com/2015/05/

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the demons of bad luck away from the coming year; those rituals have been revived

with a great deal of local popularity since 2002.

That popularity reflects the long history of the New Year festival, and of local Chinese

communities, in Singkawang. As noted earlier Singkawang is unique in Indonesia given

it is the only city in the country with a majority Chinese Indonesian population. Hakka,

a Chinese dialect, is the city’s main language. The relationship between the city and the

cultural history of China in Singkawang is intimate, and extends to the mutual

transculturation of Chinese, Dayak (Indigenous peoples of Kalimantan) and Malay

peoples in Kalimantan. This relationship, I argue, is responsible for the intensity of the

local assimilation and adoption of the Chinese New Year festival. Historically, Chinese

and Dayaks have been viewed in Indonesia as ethnic collaborators. Although Dayaks

have clashed with Chinese in the past, such conflicts were often instigated by external

parties trying to use the Dayaks to control the Chinese. Today, the street parade-cum-

performance of Cap Go Meh in Singkawang provides a cultural stage on which to

display Dayak and Chinese unity. Indeed, the Singkawang parade has gained such

national attention that it is often featured in the official ‘Visit Indonesia’ tourist

calendar. The Chinese New Year festival has become a key element of the city’s

cultural landscape and a popular tourist destination. The renewed celebration of Chinese

New Year may therefore be regarded as one of the cultural milestones signalling a new

era ‘position’ for Chinese communities in Indonesia.

These events raise important questions. What causes some Chinese New Year festivals

in Indonesia to be remembered and resuscitated, while others become moments of

forgotten, indeed repressed, culture? What do these processes of remembering and

forgetting reveal about Chinese Indonesian desires and hopes in Indonesian national

time, space and place? What are the relationships between the city and the city-street

performance that epitomize the celebration of Chinese New Year? Such questions

underpin my thinking about the Chinese New Year celebrations in Singkawang.

* * *

The following short narrative is intended to introduce and explain the accompanying

visual narrative or visual ethnography, curated by Ilaria Vanni, of Chinese New Year

performances in Singkawang, where the street parade traverses the city’s main streets,

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and the parade’s participants engage in a variety of rituals and performances. The visual

observations that I include here help to demonstrate the role played by the street-

performance imagination in accumulating religious, cultural and social symbolism in

the context of the cosmopolitan city that hosts the New Year festival. Indeed, in

Singkawang, the festival seems to portray the city’s ideal cosmopolitan resident as a

figure who is flexible, adaptable, open to a plurality of cultures and willing to engage in,

and with, multiple new cultural forms. In practice, what occurs in the festival is a

reimagining of the town, a reorientation towards its complex sociocultural history and

its contemporary ethnocultural realities. The parade’s performance of cultural

imaginations, notably Chinese cultural expressions, enacts a sense of cross-community

and transhistorical connection, to the extent that participants and audience appear to

embrace a national cultural imaginary that fuels the continued construction and

reconstruction of Chinese Indonesian culture as at once a specific local identity place

and a specific local sociocultural space.

Some of the street parade performers, acting as spirit mediums, sit on chairs embedded

with knives or studded with nails, but more often they stand on the chairs with their bare

feet on the sharpened edge of the knife blades. Some parade participants carry portable

altars and palanquins on which are mounted images of deities. The procession includes

dragon and lion dancers and a group of young men carrying staffs topped with papier-

mâché sculptures of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals. Carried on the shoulders of

chair-bearers, the Singkawang performers ride high above the crowds, as if on parade

floats. The crowd that packs the streets has a good view of these performers as they

undertake acrobatic stunts, balancing on their stomachs or rocking upon the knives set

into the chairs.

Among the performers, there are essentially three distinct groups—Chinese, Dayak and

Malay—each distinguished by their dress. The Chinese wear the military uniforms of

Ming generals and foot soldiers as depicted in Chinese opera. The Dayak costume

comprises embroidered vests that resembled the traditional baju burung (bird garment)

or jacket over trousers, covered by embroidered aprons that pass for the traditional sirat

or cawat (loincloths). Dayak performers wear headbands or helmets decorated with

hornbill and pheasant feathers. Participants who might be termed Malay also wear a

distinctive costume, which comprises t-shirt (singlets) or vests over trousers with cloth

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sashes tied criss-cross over their chests and arms, and on their heads bandanas.

Such material and sartorial symbolism—which also imply that audiences will be

reading proceedings and bodies for signs of participants’ wealth and status—in the

context of the visual performances comprising the Chinese New Year celebrations in

Singkawang are alluring and powerful precisely because of the complex sociocultural

and ethnic identifications that feed into such religious rituals. A focus on the

performativities encapsulating Cap Go Meh in Singkawang usefully begins to recognize

how the parade is not only typical of the resuscitated, historically anchored work of

Chinese cultural practices and identities, but also indicative of how those practices and

identities have been institutionalized into the rituals of the city, and the Indonesian

nation state itself. As the following visual ethnography aims to reveal, the Cap Go Meh

street parades are legible as drama, ritual theatre, a mode of visual identity-making, and

political circus and thus, ultimately, as central to the iconography of the city and its

ethnicized communities.

Visual ethnography: Chinese New Year, Singkawang

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