Date of Award
Spring 2025
Language
English
Embargo Period
4-25-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Political Science
Program
Political Science
First Advisor
Meredith Weiss
Committee Members
Meredith Weiss, Cheng Chen, Francisco Vieyra
Keywords
Ethnic Chinese, Southeast Asia, Ethnic Politics, Ideology, Communism, Nation Building
Subject Categories
Comparative Politics
Abstract
Post-colonial multiethnic societies still face significant challenges in nation-building today. Not only do countries follow different paths in dealing with ethnic diversity, but many also shift their strategies across time. State policies towards the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, including accommodation, integration, marginalization, and assimilation, vary along two dimensions: the state’s discrimination towards the ethnic Chinese and the room for negotiation between the state and the ethnic Chinese in formulating these policies. Based on puzzling empirical observations on differing levels of changes in state policies towards the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s, my research aims to explain what drove the varied degrees of policy changes across the three cases. More broadly, what factors explain the different levels of policy changes across cases in the post-colonial contexts? To address these questions, my dissertation conducts a critical juncture analysis to investigate how the state’s ideological framing of the ethnic Chinese as communists in the formative years of the three cases—roughly from the 1950s to the 1960s—triggered varying levels of policy changes and how such framing strategy shaped their trajectories of nation-building in the long run. My arguments are composed of three parts. First, I argue that communist ideology plays a critical role in the formulation of state strategies toward ethnic Chinese. Second, I treat framing as the core step linking communism with Chineseness. By performing the core tasks of framing, state elites deliberately altered the nature of the “Chinese problem” to an ideological issue; their efforts to conflate Chinese ethnicity with communist ideology served as a master frame guiding the state’s moves to formulate policies towards the ethnic Chinese in the three cases. Third, I locate state elites’ ideological framing of the ethnic Chinese as communists during the critical juncture from the 1950s to 1960s as the main driving force generating the differing levels of changes in state policies towards the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, variations in the framing strategy, driven by varying levels of threats posed by the ethnic Chinese as “communists,” give rise to the different levels of changes in state policies towards the ethnic Chinese across cases. Such causal effects are mediated through the combination of two key factors: the urgency of communist threats and the tractability of the Chinese ethnicity. Furthermore, I identify two subtypes of critical juncture across the three cases, namely, the generative type in Indonesia and the activating type in Malaysia and Singapore, given the different conditioning effects of critical antecedents on the critical juncture as well as a legitimation mechanism linking the critical juncture and the legacies it generates all three cases share in common. My research not only contributes to the existing political science literature on ethnic politics and sociological studies of group threats and framing but also sheds new light on our understanding of the effects of ideology on ethnicity in post-colonial multiethnic states.
License
This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Zheng, "Framing Ethnicity: How Ideological Threats Shape State Policies towards the Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia" (2025). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 237.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/237
