Indonesia’s dictatorship forced ethnic Chinese to adopt Javanese-sounding names

Evidence

During that election, Jokowi’s vice gubernatorial candidate was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, but everyone called him by his Hakka Chinese nickname, “Ahok.” The fact that his name was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama in the first place is evidence of the deep anti-Chinese sentiment officialized during the US-backed dictatorship. Many ethnic Chinese citizens were forced to change their names, adopting something that sounded Javanese or Muslim. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 690

Categorization

• XREF: Complements ch7’s discussion of US-backed mass violence creating client regimes; the 1965 killings pattern recurs here after ~1 million deaths.