1 - Historical Alibis in 1970s Chinese Novels about Indentured Labor Migration to Indonesia

Presentation Abstract
Why did “coolie literature,” or historical fiction about indentured labor experience in Indonesia, have a resurgence in China during the 1970s? Writers from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and British Hong Kong wrote from experience or imagination about servitude in the British and Dutch East Indies with empathy and indignation for this bygone period. Rather than take their novels at face value, as their realist accounts demand, I examine their situatedness within, and thus sublimation of, the tumultuous politics coinciding with guiqiao (returned overseas Chinese), Bandung, nationalist, and Cultural Revolution concerns during the global Cold War period. “Bourgeois” guiqiao from the South Seas are integrated to state farms in new China amid the unfolding drama of a valorization of manual labor as revolutionary labor, as well as anti-imperial projects of Third World radicalism. Do such “coolie novels” serve as historical alibi for returned Chinese, whose experience has mostly been studied as part of a global history of Chinese labor migration? Did coolie (laogong) experience abroad seamlessly reflect onto the new theoretical terms of manual labor (laodong)? To answer this question, I look at novels by Huang Dongping, Dong Rui, Hong Sisi, and Xiao Cun. The ban on Chinese publications in Suharto-era Indonesia also impelled these writers to publish in Hong Kong, Singapore, and China—oceanic crossroads that facilitated their subjects’ labor migration to Indonesia in the first place. Particular attention will be paid to consulates, immigration checkpoints, and labor bureaus—or crossroads—in their works.