World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [24]
42 Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department called resoundingly for free markets and democratic elections.
After the May 1998 riots, anti-Chinese violence, often preceded by spray-painted symbols marking Chinese shops and homes as targets, continued to break out, not just in Jakarta but throughout Indonesia’s cities. Unlike Salim or other tycoons, most Chinese Indonesians did not have the wherewithal to leave the country. They remained in the only home they had ever known, stockpiling weapons to defend themselves. Hundreds of Chinese Indonesians purchased “anti-rape corsets”: a stainless steel chastity belt, complete with tiny key, developed by a Chinese entrepreneur.
43
Much of the capital that fled Indonesia in 1998 ended up in Singapore. (Australia was another favorite destination.) Often disappointingly sterile to Western visitors, Singapore has for years been a multipurpose haven for Sino-Indonesians. Today, violence in Indonesia has subsided, and even as the great majority of pribumi Indonesians struggle to survive, the Friday afternoon Garuda Airlines flight to Singapore is packed with gaily jabbering ibu—the wives of Chinese Indonesian businessmen going to Singapore for the weekend to shop and dine. The latest rage in Singapore is “medical tourism.” Given Indonesia’s frightening hospital and health statistics, a constant stream of Indonesian Chinese fly to Singapore for cutting-edge medical care, from chemotherapy to liposuction and, especially popular among young Chinese women, operations on the epicanthic fold to produce Caucasian “double eyelids.”
Indonesia’s population is 210 million; Singapore’s population is just over 3 million. Whereas the Chinese are a market-dominant minority in Indonesia (and the rest of Southeast Asia), in Singapore they are an 80 percent market-dominant majority. Indonesia’s per capita income is around $2,000—and it’s that high only because of the country’s many wealthy Chinese. Singapore’s per capita income is around $27,000, higher than that of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
44 Ethnic violence in Singapore is virtually unheard-of. For Indonesian Chinese, explains one Singaporean law professor, “Singapore is seen as Valhalla: a place where things work, where things are what they should be and would be if Chinese were in charge.”
The Wrath of the Many
The Chinese are not the only market-dominant minority in Asia. Throughout the region, resentment and vindictive terror have been directed at other disproportionately successful minorities with the same ferocity. India, for example, has no market-dominant minority at the national level, but plenty of market-dominant minorities at the state level. Thus, in the oil-rich northern state of Assam, Bengali immigrants, now roughly 40 percent of the population, have for years dominated commerce and the professions. Between 1979 and 1983, enraged members of the Assamese majority repeatedly attacked Bengalis in widespread, vicious ethnic riots.
45 In Sri Lanka, the Ceylon Tamils, historically more educated, prosperous, and “advanced” than the Sinhalese majority, dominated the economy until a wave of anti-Tamil reprisals in the 1970s; ethnic strife continues to this day. Recently, writes Thomas Sowell, “a Tamil woman picked at random was dragged off a bus in Sri Lanka, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze by a Sinhalese mob in which people danced and clapped their hands while she died in agony.”
46
Nevertheless, no minority in Asia is, or has ever been, as stunningly wealthy or glaringly market-dominant as the ethnic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, who collectively control virtually all of the region’s most advanced and lucrative industries as well as its economic crown jewels. As the U.S. government and international financial institutions continue to call for faster and