東南アジア研究　42巻 1 号 106 Notes on Indonesian-Chinese and Filipino-Chinese Literature By Caroline S. HAU * In both Indonesia and the Philippines, which were subject to more than three centuries of colonization by the early maritime empires of Holland and Spain respectively, there developed—owing to the late immigration of Chinese women—Chinese creole populations through the intermarriage of Chinese immigrant and native peoples. In the early nineteenth century, there were 100,000 such peranakan in Java, making up 2% of its population. The Chinese mestizo population in the Philippines at that time was the most sizeable in Southeast Asia, with 120,000 making up nearly 5% of the colonial population. What was remarkable about these creole communities was the extent to which, despite continuing contact with both native and Chinese groups, they achieved a degree of cohesion and stability as communities that remained distinct from the “native” societies. Also noteworthy is the extent to which these communities underwent radical redefinition from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Their language was a creole based on indigenous languages mixed with Dutch/Spanish, Chinese, and other tongues. While the Chinese were subjected to periodic massacres and expul- sions by the Dutch and Spaniards during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mestizo or peranakan communities which flourished in their aftermath filled the roles vacated by the Chinese and performed crucial economic functions within the respective colonial states as middlemen traders, artisans, and in the Indonesian case, laborers. They were accorded distinct legal status as a mediating category between natives and Chinese, and subject to specific regulations and restrictions. Not just a product of census classifi- cation and taxation, they resisted assimilation because native society in both countries occupied the lowest rung in the colonial hierarchy and was even more vulnerable to arbitrary colonial rule than Chinese society, and assimilation to native society was consequently considered a sign of downward social and economic mobility. Economic competition with the Chinese over retail and wholesale trade engendered antagonism between Chinese and Chinese mestizos before the Chinese mestizos shifted to agriculture, land- holding and professions after they were displaced in the mid-nineteenth century when the Chinese were allowed back in the Philippines. These Chinese mestizos merged with prosperous indige- nous elites and formed the backbone of the Hispanized, Catholic elite which came to define themselves as “Filipinos” (a term hitherto applied to fullblooded Spaniards born in the Philippines). In Java, a similar alliance between peranakan and natives against Chinese took place, but because of the plurality of religious backgrounds of these classes, peranakan culture crystallized rather than blended into elite native culture. In both countries, the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the rapid growth of totok (China-born Chinese) communities, the flowering of organizational activities in the context of emergent Chinese and Southeast Asian nation- alisms, and the call for re-sinicization. But while peranakan communities in Indonesia remained * Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University 東南アジア研究　42巻 1 号　2004年６月