Soe Hok-Gie : a biography of a young Indonesian intellectual

Abstract

This thesis is a biographical study of a young Indonesian intellectual, Soe Hok-gie, set against the background of Indonesian politics during the 1960s. The biography begins in Chapter 1 by sketching Soe's family background and considering those factors that moulded and conditioned his personality and his perceptions of the world around him: the immediate family circle, the particular Jakarta milieu in which he grew up, his early schooling and secondary education, and the impact of his own reading and the mass media. The aim is to detect the early glimmerings of the political activist of his mature years. Chapter 2 offers a concise overview of Indonesian national politics during the 1950s and 1960s, that period when Soe's own understanding of politics was steadily developing. The emphasis is on the Guided Democracy years and the rising tensions within the political system, especially after 1963. Chapter 3 considers Soe's gradual emergence as a political activist in the early 1960s after his enrolment as a student at the University of Indonesia. This part of the thesis describes his contribution to the assimilation movement within the Sino-Indonesian community, his initial contacts with student political activists, and his discovery of one small clandestine group of committed opponents of Sukarno and Guided Democracy. The chapter concludes by considering the escalating tension within student politics during the early 1960s and its impact on Soe's own campus. Chapter 4 is a detailed account, largely from Soe Hok-gie's own perspective, of the student movement that emerged in response to the attempted coup of 1 October 1965. This chapter considers Soe's own participation and leadership role throughout the various phases of this movement, and describes the increasing chaos on the streets of Jakarta that culminated in Sukarno's granting of emergency powers to Soeharto on 11 March 1966. Chapter 5 examines the protracted struggle throughout 1966 to force Sukarno from the presidency, and outlines Soe's own advocacy of a militant and uncompromising approach towards both Sukarno and the Old Order through his student radio broadcasts and his early journalism. His own aspirations for the post-Sukarno era are discussed, as are his initial anxieties about the course and direction national politics appeared to be taking. Soe's own response to the emerging character of the New Order government is the central theme of Chapter 6. During the late 1960s, while rejecting the view that students had earned the right to play a permanent role in national politics, Soe emerged as a prominent public intellectual offering a critical independent commentary on some of the key moral, social and political issues of the day. Throughout this period his own life was marked by a growing sense of isolation from the world around him. The epilogue considers the impact of Soe's life, both on those who knew him directly and on later generations of students and activists who learnt of him through his writings. The study concludes by reflecting briefly on certain characteristic features of Soe's approach to politics. Show more