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Indonesia
This Week in AsiaLifestyle & Culture

‘Cina’ to ‘Tionghoa’: why do Indonesians use English to talk about the Chinese?

  • Usage of ‘Tionghoa’ became official in 2014, but it needed a presidential decree amid considerable controversy to replace the derogatory former term
  • But modern usage trends towards using the English word, a sign of an increasingly popular linguistic transition among the Indonesian middle class

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A man prays during Lunar New Year celebrations at a temple in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Reuters
Johannes Nugroho
When President Joko Widodo in February extended his best wishes to Indonesia’s Chinese community for Lunar New Year, he referred to them as “Tionghoa”. The word is now used in the Southeast Asian nation to describe its Chinese ethnic minority group, yet it was only officially adopted in 2014 – and it needed a presidential decree, amid considerable controversy.

It is not often that a language becomes the reason for a public debate. Yet this is what happened in Indonesia that year, following a plan to formalise the terms “Tiongkok”, for China, and “Tionghoa”, for Chinese, to replace the word “Cina” in Bahasa Indonesia.

At the time, “Cina” was being used for both China as a country as well as the Chinese people and their culture. But throughout Indonesian history, the word had also been used derogatorily to imply that Chinese Indonesians were foreigners. The decree from then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was seen as the logical next step in protecting the rights of the community – which make up between 4 and 5 per cent of Indonesia’s 270 million people – after Lunar New Year was first declared as a national holiday in 2003.

But things took an unexpected turn as linguists debated whether the Indonesian language should bow to what many viewed as political correctness. It did not help that the government of China was also seen to be wading into the debate.

“The Chinese embassy in Jakarta tried to pressure both our government and media into abandoning the public use of the term ‘Cina’. Our media, with the exception of Tempo – which still uses ‘Cina’ or ‘China’ interchangeably today – in the end capitulated,” said Yos Wibisono, a language historian and former journalist at Radio Nederland.

Photographs of citizens of Chinese heritage who contributed to Indonesia in various fields are displayed at the Hakka Museum in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Agoes Rudianto
Photographs of citizens of Chinese heritage who contributed to Indonesia in various fields are displayed at the Hakka Museum in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Agoes Rudianto
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