Search Results

This chapter examines the opening up of the Chinese socio-cultural sphere in post-Suharto Medan and Surabaya. Chinese Indonesians who strongly support Chinese ethnic and cultural identities have made use of the more liberal environment to establish Chinese-based organisations and Chinese-language newspapers. In general, these organisations and newspapers have made use of intra-ethnic linkages to safeguard Chinese ethnic and cultural identities, thus contributing to multiculturalism in post-Suharto Indonesia. The rise of China as an economic power has also prompted leaders of some Chinese organisations to utilise their intra-ethnic linkages and social networks in China to assist local governments in establishing cultural and business connections with China. Many indigenous Indonesians, however, perceive that the active role of Chinese organisations in promoting Chinese culture indicates an insistence upon separateness. At the same time, there are Chinese Indonesians who favour the integration of the Chinese into the wider Indonesian society and who have established non-ethnic-based socio-cultural organisations to promote cross-ethnic understanding and solidarity. On the whole, however, the socio-cultural activities and endeavours of Chinese organisations and Chinese-language newspapers have reproduced and perpetuated stereotypes of the Chinese as insular, opportunistic, and oriented towards China instead of Indonesia.

Although women were largely absent from male-dominated Chinese community discussions on democratic values, brotherhood, diaspora unity, and Han-identity nationalism, they were not absent from Chinese Australians’ modern social life from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. By examining public comments and views in Chinese Australian newspapers regarding gender as a new social relationship, this chapter argues that the newspapers provide a window through male narratives that now enables us to espy how the Chinese population deliberated women’s social role and the way it was changing. The chapter aims to uncover through an investigation of the historic records, in the social life of Chinese Australians, the male-dominated view of gender role reconciled on the one hand the desire to segregate women from public discussions and participation, and on the other the need to involve women’s presence to demonstrate respectability and social standing to meet Australian social expectations. These public narratives and social networks provide a new approach to apprehending the nature and importance of Chinese Australian social life.

This chapter details how the state's use of media to disseminate law and report on certain local problems, paired with political fragmentation and the marketization of the press, provided conditions for certain media and legal professionals to build networks and collaborate. Such collaboration pushed the boundaries of critical news reporting and expanded the concept of rights beyond socioeconomic issues. The chapter first demonstrates the rise of critical news reporting in the mid-2000s. Next, it describes how media marketization—a process that accelerated starting in the early 1990s—reshaped the political, economic, and professional environment in which Chinese newspapers were embedded. After briefly describing a parallel process in the transformation of the legal profession, the chapter then shows how the national process of media marketization and law dissemination programs unfolded differently in localities with dissimilar political and market conditions.

Since the early 19^th century, Chinese languages pop cultures have been financed, produced, distributed, circulated and consumed among ethnic Chinese population in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Illustrative of this highly integrated industrial structure is the Shaw Brothers, a pillar in this Chinese languages media industry. Shaw Brothers started business in Shanghai in the 1920s, moved its financial operation to Singapore in the 1950s, produced films in Hong Kong and distributed and exhibited them in its network of cinemas throughout Southeast Asia in the 1960s and now produces and distributes television dramas throughout the same network. This ethnic Chinese population arguing share more knowledge about Chinese languages pop culture than about Confucianism, especially among those below forty years old. The greater cultural China is thus more accurately represented as a Pop Culture China, a decentred, multi-lingual, multi-nodal relatively well integrated cultural economy that operates under the presumed ‘sameness’ of a ‘common’ Chinese cultural heritage, then being unified by some grand philosophical-civilizational tradition. Pop Culture China is made manifest daily through the entertainment pages of the mass media in the constitutive locations.

Wong left Chicago for New York, and he established the first Chinese-language newspaper east of the Rockies. He named the paper ‘Chinese American’ and became the paper’s editor. The challenges which Wong encountered in running the newpaper company included money matters and labour issues. In late 1883 Chinese American ceased publication, nevertheless, it by no means marked the end of Wong’s career as a journalist.