This paper attempts to appraise just one facet of the Chinese community in Singapore — its demographic character and the degree to which this is distinctive within the broader setting of Singapore society at large. The information available as the basis for such an analysis is limited and more definitive statements on trends and differences will be possible as the statistics compiled from the 1980 census become available.

Important changes are occurring within the Chinese community which have considerable significance for the republic but for which there is no direct basis of comparison with other ethnic communities. These considerations have not been examined here but include the changing behaviour in matters of kinship, associations and societies, marriage, religion, and similar elements central to the Chinese community. Perhaps the most significant of these currently is the issue of language and the active promotion by government of Mandarin not only as the official Chinese language but as a substitute for dialects in circumstances where, until now, they have been dominant. Although surveys of language use have been carried out recently, these have been too small and too specialized to provide a basis for general conclusions, and again it is to be hoped that the 1980 census data will provide an updated benchmark for this parameter comparable to that of earlier censuses.

The history of thought, as of everything else, in or about Indonesia naturally falls into two parts: before and after independence. The first half of this paper, therefore, will deal with thought, mainly Dutch thought, in the colonial period, the second with thought, mainly Indonesian thought, since independence.

In recent years a sizeable literature has emerged concerning the Indian Ocean, owing in particular to the growth of perceived superpower rivalry and the resulting proposal by some littoral and regional states, notably Sri Lanka and India that the Indian Ocean should be declared a zone of peace. The strategic importance of the ocean has been dramatized by the build-up of the U. S. base in Diego Garcia. Every port and island has become of potential strategic importance as well. In the early 1970s, concern was expressed in the West over reports of Soviet bases at Berbera and Socotra in Somalia and the possible use of Gan in the Maldives after British withdrawal. As a highlight to this wider canvas, the Cocos-Keeling Islands emerged briefly in 1972 both as an internal Australian political issue which embarrassed the then ruling Liberal-Country party government and as a potentially embarrassing international issue at a time when Australia was preparing Papua-New Guinea for independence. However, the Cocos-Keeling Islands quickly slipped back into the obscurity from which they had briefly emerged, both during the period of Gough Whitlam's Labour government and later when the Liberal-Country party came back to power.

The rise and fall of a Chinese colonial town within Batavia was closely related to the transmutation in Batavia's function as a capital. In the early seventeenth century it was founded as the headquarters to a — mainly inter-Asian — maritime trading East Indies Company at war with the Iberian enemy. As the staple town to the Company, “het magazijn van derzelven producten”, it served both strategic and mercantile goals. From the late seventeenth century onwards a structural change took place. Wars with European rivals were over and trade with the motherland became emphasized at the expense of the Asian “country trade”. On Java, the Company gradually transformed itself into a territorial power, which derived its main income from a system of contingenten and verplichte leverantiën, or tributary payments. Consequently, Batavia lost most of its dynamic function as a headquarters to a maritime trade empire. The adaptation of the city into its new role, e.g., to function as a capital to a territorial hinterland, did not progress smoothly.

Singularly little scholarly work has been devoted to the religious life of the Chinese of Southeast Asia. This is particularly true of the Indonesian Chinese. The only major work on Chinese religion in Indonesia to appear in decades is Les Chinois de Jakarta: Temples et Vie Collective. The unique and astonishing transformation of Confucianism into an organized religion as practised today under the auspices of MATAKIN (Majelis Tinggi Agama Khonghucu Indonesia — the Supreme Council for the Confucian Religion in Indonesia) has so far only been discussed in two short essays.

This paper attempts to analyse Sino-Indonesian relations and the problems as perceived by Indonesian ruling and counter-elites, as well as the place of the Chinese minority in the issue of such a normalization. Pro- and anti-normalization groups are identified and two Presidential Decrees — one granting citizenship certificates and the other granting “mass naturalization” to ethnic Chinese — are analysed in the context of normalization. Possible outcomes will also be discussed.

On the night of 18 September 1931, there was an explosion on the Manchurian railway near Mukden. This incident triggered another series of anti-Japanese incidents among the Chinese in the Philippines as an expression of their patriotic feeling.

In southeastern China where most villages consisted of people with the same surname, lineage and clan became the foundation of the local community. As the village people moved to the cities of China or overseas, they organized clan associations to gather distant agnates and set up ancestral altars to strengthen kinship ties among clansmen. Clanship emerged in a new form to cope with changes encountered in different milieus and continued to serve its functions. The transformation, however, has never really changed the clan to a club as its membership has remained restricted even if the membership has remained restricted even if the. The clan associations retain enough kinship elements to function like a traditional clan.

Overseas Chinese played a special role in China's entry into the modern age. Volumes have appeared to discuss the competition between revolutionaries and reformers, and this author has written of the late Ch'ing regime's own efforts to enlist leading members of the Nanyang merchant class. But this essay intends to shy away from the historian's conventional concern for factional politics. Despite the long-standing conviction that 1911 constituted a watershed and the equally worn shibboleth which tells us that the contribution from abroad was largely a function of factional allegiance, the Southeast Asian Chinese who took part in changing China should also be remembered for the perspectives they shared. This is because all the groups are part of a movement greater than China. Not only should their legacy to China be viewed from a far broader perspective but, also, their place in Southeast Asian history.

A great deal has been written during the last three decades on the Chinese in Southeast Asia in Chinese and Japanese generally and in English particularly. The outstanding feature of the Western approach to studying this ethnic community has been that research methods of sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists have largely replaced those of historians.