David Mozingo - Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967

I am indebted to many persons for helpful suggestions, criticism, and encouragement received during the preparation of this work. Most of all I am grateful to H. Arthur Steiner and George McT. Kahin. The first introduced me to, and taught me how to study, China; the second helped me to understand the societies and history of Southeast Asia and, through the example of his own work, inspired this study. I would also like to give special thanks to Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Herbert S. Dinerstein, Edward Friedman, Alexander George, Melvin Gurtov, Paul F. Langer, John W. Lewis, Ruth McVey, Guy Pauker, Myron Rush, and David A. Wilson. Many Indonesian and Chinese friends contributed much of the information on which this book is based. Because the issue of relations with China is still politically sensitive in Indonesia, no purpose would be served by mentioning their names. But without their help and confidence I would not have been able to finish this project.

The Ford Foundation gave generous financial support that made it possible for me to undertake language and political studies at Cornell University and to complete field research in Indonesia and Hong Kong. Subsequent grants from the China-Japan Program and the International Relations of East Asia Project, both of Cornell University, freed me from teaching obligations long enough to bring this work to completion.

David Mozingo
Itacha, New York

On August 17, 1965, in a speech commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Indonesia's proclamation of independence, President Sukarno announced the existence of a diplomatic and political alignment between the Chinese People's Republic and the Republic of Indonesia. Although a de facto entente between the two powers had been steadily developing since late in 1963, Sukarno's speech included the first official acknowledgment that the purpose of the alignment was to break up the Federation of Malaysia, to outflank the Anglo-American position in Southeast Asia, and to organize an Afro-Asian coalition of "newly emerging forces" opposed to the Western powers.

Six weeks after the speech the Peking-Djakarta axis suddenly began to disintegrate, following an abortive coup on October 1st by junior army officers, aided by the Indonesian Communist party (PKI), which aimed at liquidating the pro-Western Indonesian army high command. The coup attempt set off a massive anti-communist chain reaction that led, in rapid succession, to the bloody suppression of the PKI, the overthrow of the Sukarno government by a right-wing military junta, a complete diplomatic rupture with Peking, and the restoration of Indonesia's close ties with the Western powers. Almost overnight an alliance with Indonesia that appeared to be the most spectacular achievement of China's diplomatic strategy in a decade had resulted in a major foreign-policy disaster for China.

The short-lived Peking-Djakarta axis and the 1965 Indonesian coup are the two events that most dramatically demonstrate the unstable foundation of Chinese policy in Indonesia. In the seventeen years between the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1950 and their suspension in 1967, Chinese policy in Indonesia underwent a complete transformation but eventually came full circle. It began with an attitude of revolutionary militancy and hostility toward the newly independent Indonesian republic; shifted to a posture of peaceful coexistence and friendship in the mid-1950s; reached its zenith of success in the period of the Peking-Djakarta axis; and returned to its original revolutionary attitudes in 1967, following an anticommunist counterrevolution in Indonesia and the radicalization of China's foreign policy during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The stages in the evolution of Chinese policy in Indonesia during this period corresponded, in general, to the phases in the development of her policies toward the entire Afro-Asian world after 1949. An analysis of the Sino-Indonesian relationship may, therefore, make more apparent the larger patterns of Peking's policies in the Third World generally and toward her noncommunist Asian neighbors particularly. The history of Chinese diplomacy indicates clearly that Peking's relations with all these nations, including Indonesia, have been persistently ambivalent.

The test of an effective foreign policy is not, of course, that it manifests no ambivalence. Few foreign policies would be able to pass this test. Nor should the effectiveness of a policy be measured by its stability, consistency, or success in producing harmonious relations with other states, for acquiring these attributes may not be its main or even its desired goal. The only reasonable criterion of effectiveness is whether, on balance, a policy achieves those objectives desired by its makers. According to this standard, Chinese policy in Indonesia was clearly a failure, whether one concludes that its basic goal was to maximize Chinese and communist influence or, as the present writer believes, to strengthen those elements in Indonesia that wanted to make their country independent of the major capitalist powers and the Soviet Union. There were spasms of momentary success, to be sure, but in the end the entire policy met with crushing defeat.

The central question this study explores is why China's policy in Indonesia failed. Theoretically, the general or any specific bilateral policy of a state may fail for one or a combination of reasons: (1) the goals of a state may not be commensurate with the resources available or committed to achieve them; (2) the policy makers' assessment of the external situation may be unrealistic; (3) important new factors may emerge or events occur that may invalidate a previously successful policy; and (4) faulty execution may, of course, cause the failure of the most carefully fashioned Machiavellian schemes. From the mid-1950s until the 1965 coup, China's policy in Indonesia appeared to skillfully navigate among these shoals and to be on the verge of a major triumph that might have far-reaching geopolitical consequences. The occurrence that altered the emerging Chinese gain was the Indonesian coup, an unexpected and disastrous event that Peking could not have prevented. It might be argued that, in a sense, Chinese policy in Indonesia was not actually defeated but simply proved vulnerable to the kind of internal upheaval abroad that periodically undermines the foreign policies of all the great powers.

More fundamentally, however, the policies of the Chinese leaders themselves were the factors most responsible for the failure in Indonesia. It was a matter of choice, not accident, that they decided not to pursue modest objectives and not to employ a cautious strategy, which would have been better calculated to avoid potential disaster than the goals and tactics they chose. China's leaders opted for an ambitious policy, a power alignment with the highly unpredictable and unstable Sukarno government. They were evidently willing to incur high risks despite the well-known influence of pro-Western generals in his regime, widespread Indonesian suspicion of Peking because of its ties with the Indonesian communists, and Chinas lack of the power resources to bend this alliance to her will or, if threatened from outside, to defend it. In view of its own earlier experience with bourgeois nationalist elements during the Chinese civil war and the wavering record of Third World governments led by these classes after 1949, the Chinese leadership ought to have foreseen that a close relationship with Sukarno's Indonesia was fraught with danger.

But perceived opportunity, not justifiable suspicions, governed Chinese policy, especially from 1961 on, when the prospect of an alliance with Indonesia became a significant component of Peking's global anti-imperialist strategy. In the main, that strategy was forced on China, because she perceived, with good reason, that the United States and the Soviet Union were bent on encircling her, and she was determined to oppose them. This well-grounded fear, however, hardly made a highly risky alliance with the Sukarno regime and its PKI supporters seem a necessary or even an attainable means of organizing an anti-imperialist counterstrategy. Indeed, the venture in Indonesia was in marked contrast to the general style of Chinese foreign policy during the preceding seventeen years, a policy which had been characterized by great caution and deftness. Was the conduct of the policy in Indonesia merely an exception to the general norm? Or was it the product of more pervasive pressures operating on Chinese foreign policy as a whole, which eventually had a cumulative effect in relation to Indonesia? This study finds that the evidence sustains the second interpretation.