Under the Red-and-White Flag: elective Chineseness and socialist realism in Hei Ying's Jakarta

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hei Ying’s 1950 novella Under the Red-and-White Flag concerns the Chinese-speaking institutions and community in Jakarta as they respond to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Far from the sultry exoticism of his earlier Nanyang (South Seas) texts, this work turned towards a socialist realism broadly in line with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and prepared Hei Ying for his subsequent career as a “returned Overseas Chinese” (guiqiao) man of letters. Hei Ying's political and literary shift emblematises a larger dynamic: the subordination of some Sinophone Southeast Asian subjects, often voluntarily, to new and starker dichotomies of Chinese political identity, as the foundation of new states in the emerging Cold War foreclosed on flexible Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural and political identities. Sinophone groups like those represented by Hei Ying could and did support Indonesia's National Revolution and striving for prosperity in the name of global solidarity; however, the individual's belonging was for them ethnically defined, and ethnic and political identity were irreducibly linked in works such as this novella. Due to the hardening of political boundaries in the early Cold War, decolonising Asia rendered cultural hybridity increasingly politically suspect as new states defined themselves by autochthony. If the place of ethnic Chinese was to build New China, political duties granted no licence to cultural hybridity, much as they also restricted experimental and effusive veins of literary modernism.