In addition, I intended to meet the bosses of the top groups in Indonesia, even though ac- cess was a serious problem.
11
The interviews that I eventually conducted with some of the most important capitalists in Indonesia today – Anthony Salim Salim Group, Tomy Winata
Artha Graha Group, Eddie Lembong Pharos Group, also Chair of the Chinese Indonesian Association INTI, and Sofjan Wanandi Gemala Group, also Chair of the Indonesian Em-
ployers Association APINDO – delivered a wealth of information that I would not have found elsewhere and helped to verify or repudiate hypotheses and substantiate my interpreta-
tions. Altogether, I conducted 62 semi-structured interviews with 51 persons. However, the
challenge was to put this kind of information together with the other bits and pieces, to evalu- ate and analyse them and combine my own assessments with the reflections and judgements
of these and other observers.
1.4 Outline
Chapter 1 has briefly outlined the major questions, the focus, the central argument, and the methodology of this study. The following chapters will provide theoretical, historical, and
empirical analyses to explain the course of capital before, in, and after the crisis.
11
It was immensely difficult to finally get in contact with the manager-owners of the conglomerates. As a general rule, it was essential to know somebody who referred you to someone else who was a
friend of a friend of the respective businessmen. Thereafter, I had to send in letters, emails, or faxes, find out the number of the personal secretary, call her, submit another fax, call the office again, wait for
a return call, call again, send in a third fax that – in case I was lucky – got through to the boss, who then decided if he had some time to spare with a young and unimportant researcher. It helped that the
businessmen regarded me as ‘one of them’ in terms of Chinese Indonesian ethnicity, that I am German, that I studied in Singapore, or that I was attached to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies –
or a combination thereof. This, presumably, made me more trustworthy in their eyes. Usually, I first had to talk to a proxy. One of them obviously recommended to his boss not to talk to me, even though
the interview was already scheduled. For another conversation, I flew back to Jakarta twice, only to be told – while already waiting for the respondent in his office – that he was too tired to be interviewed by
me, or, the following time, that he was in Singapore where I just came from and thus could not meet me. A further interviewee wanted me to submit the transcription of the talk and censored it signifi-
cantly.
Chapter 2 discusses theoretical perspectives on capital and the state, including culturalist and structuralist models. It presents an approach appropriate to scrutinising the special power
relations between Chinese capitalists and the bureaucratic elite. Chapter 3 contains the historical background with an emphasis on the New Order accom-
modation. It depicts the Chinese businessmen as ‘limited capitalists’, who became part of the bureaucratic oligarchy but lacked appropriate political power.
Chapter 4 seeks to understand the conglomerates during the crisis. Without the authoritar- ian, centralised, and protectionist New Order regime they had to face serious constraints that
endangered their existence in reformasi Indonesia. Chapter 5 scrutinises the reactions of capital to the reforms. The crisis turned out to be not
too detrimental; on the contrary, most conglomerates not only managed to survive and con- solidate, but also moulded the new post-Soeharto regime significantly.
Chapter 6 analyses the changing role of Chinese big business in a more democratic, decen- tralised, and deregulated political and economic environment. It points out that capital found
new formats of representation and successfully dominated the post-crisis modes of political business.
Chapter 7 summarises the findings and relates the empirical observations of Chapters 4 to 6 to the historical background as well as to the theoretical framework. It further outlines fu-
ture prospects for Chinese big business in Indonesia.
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
POWER CONFIGURATIONS OF STATE AND CAPITAL
The state, according to Brown 1994: xii-xix, determines the boundaries, content, and char- acter of ethnicity by translating ‘sometimes minor linguistic graduations or physical variations
into cultural boundary markers which are believed to be intrinsically significant and clearly demarcated’. In the case of Indonesia, the constructed pribumi nation and the assumed soli-
darity of a ‘kinship community’ became the ‘psychological and political ideology’ against the Chinese as internal enemy Brown 1994: xviii-xix. Ethnic policies as tools of state power
limited the capitalists in Indonesia significantly. Hence, it is imperative to ask who imple- mented these policies and who benefited from them, or, in a more general sense, who holds
control over the state. Traditional class-based accounts have difficulties in attributing power to any non-capitalist class and should therefore be modified to appropriately evaluate the New
Order with its weak Chinese business element. To expand definitions of the ‘ruling class’ will thus help in assessing the role of Chinese capitalists vis-à-vis state bureaucracy.
To lay out an appropriate theoretical framework, it is first necessary to discuss the existing literature on Chinese Indonesian capitalists. I shall argue that both culturalist and structuralist
perspectives provide useful foci that only in combination deliver a fuller picture. While my study employs a political economy approach, it does not disregard the question of ethnicity.
The main objective of this chapter is to provide the analytical tools to assess the power configurations during the New Order and understand the changes brought about by reformasi.
For this, the ruling class has to be identified. Generally, as a review of state theories will show, capitalists are considered to be the ruling class in capitalist societies. In New Order In-
donesia, however, this proposition was questionable, as political authority lay exclusively with the state politico-bureaucrats, while capital, predominantly Chinese, was confined to act
inside strictly demarcated boundaries.
I suggest that the rulers of New Order Indonesia can be regarded as a complex power bloc consisting of powerful politico-bureaucrats and politically restricted Chinese capitalists that
together formed an oligarchy under the hegemony of the bureaucracy. This oligarchy, how- ever, was prone to change, especially after the state managers were considerably weakened
through new dynamics induced by the economic crisis of 19971998. Capital, no doubt, was also badly wounded, but salient elements have been able to rebound with the help of new
strategies. By means of a typology of capitalist systems I will spell out the characteristics of state–business relations during the New Order and outline potential models towards which the
post-Soeharto Indonesian state is developing.
2.1 Approaches to Chinese Indonesian capitalists
