Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

If Singapore is Southeast Asia’s intellectual heart, Indonesia, with its eighteen thousand islands and 260 million people, is its litmus test. Forty percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. More than 85 percent are Muslim. Some seven million, just 3 percent, are Chinese, but various studies over the past quarter century have put the Chinese community as controlling up to 70 percent of the Indonesian economy. Indonesia swings between embracing and rejecting its Chinese community, and there has always been friction. During the Cold War, the Chinese were suspected of supporting communism. In the 1960s, they became targets of anticommunist killings in which at least half a million died. Muslim gangs were responsible for much of the slaughter.