About Keng Po

Keng Po

Keng Po was a Malay-language Peranakan Chinese newspaper published in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies, and later in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1923 to 1958. Its name was written in Chinese characters and rendered in pinyin as Jing bao. During most of its life it was the second most popular Malay-language Chinese newspaper in the Indies, behind only its older rival Sin Po. It was also an important newspaper in the early period of Indonesian independence in the 1950s, when it was known as a strong voice of independent opposition. Keng Po was founded by Hauw Tek Kong, a former director of Sin Po who had been banned from the Indies for his anti-Dutch views. The newspaper survived press offence prosecutions in the colonial period, was shut down during the Japanese occupation, resumed publication in 1946, and launched the influential weekly magazine Star Weekly. In 1958, under official pressure against Chinese names and symbols, it changed its name to Pos Indonesia, and it ceased publication in the 1960s.

Founding by Hauw Tek Kong in 1923

Keng Po was founded in Batavia in 1923 by Hauw Tek Kong, an English-educated journalist and Chinese activist who had been director of the competing newspaper Sin Po in the 1910s. Hauw, who was born in Batavia in 1887 and was thought to have studied at the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore, had become a major shareholder in Sin Po and was appointed its director in 1913 after Oey Tjioe Yong stepped down. He became a high-profile opponent of Dutch proposals to grant citizenship or a form of qualified subjecthood to Indies Chinese. In 1919 Sin Po sent him to China to negotiate with the government there about the possible repudiation of that citizenship, and when he tried to re-enter the Indies the Dutch refused to let him in. He was banned from the Indies from 1919 until 1922 for his anti-Dutch views, and in his absence Sin Po appointed Tjoe Bou San as both editor-in-chief and director, after which Hauw resigned. By 1922, when he had abandoned his public opposition to the Dutch citizenship law, he was allowed to return. In 1923, in the midst of a disagreement with Tjoe Bou San of Sin Po, he founded Keng Po, which he launched on 1 August 1923. On founding the newspaper he appointed himself director and editor-in-chief, although he soon stepped aside from editorial duties. Khoe Woen Sioe, who would be director of the newspaper in later years, joined as an editor at some point in the early years.

The Khoe Woen Sioe press offence case of 1925

In 1925 Khoe Woen Sioe was arrested in a high-profile Persdelict, or press offence, case for an article he had published that criticised the hate speech laws in the Indies, which fell very harshly upon native and Chinese editors and writers. The case itself was not considered especially noteworthy. What made it notorious was Khoe's poor treatment in the prison in Glodok, which became a subject of discussion in the Dutch-language press of the Indies. Dutch newspapers took offence at the sight of a twenty-year-old journalist being paraded in front of the public in shackles and chains without having been found guilty of anything. He was eventually sentenced to three months imprisonment, and the sentence was confirmed in March 1926. The episode showed the risks faced by the young Chinese journalists who staffed Keng Po in its first years, and the sympathy his treatment aroused in the Dutch-language press showed that the newspaper's conflicts with the colonial legal system were watched well beyond its own Malay-reading audience. Khoe remained with the newspaper and, in the independence era, was still its director, as well as the publisher of its weekly magazine Star Weekly.

Death of the founder and editorial succession

When Hauw Tek Kong died in April 1928, one of his former colleagues from Sin Po, Lauw Giok Lan, became the new editor-in-chief of Keng Po. Hauw had suffered a health crisis in early 1928 while returning from a business trip to Tangerang, after which people remarked that he seemed different. He died in Batavia at the age of fifty-one on 7 April 1928, apparently of a stroke. Lauw Giok Lan, who had himself conceived and co-founded Sin Po in 1910, fell ill and did not stay in the editor-in-chief position for long. Nio Joe Lan, who had recently been invited to the newspaper by Lauw, a family friend, was then made editor-in-chief. In the spring of 1932 another editor of Keng Po, Tan Boen Soan, left to become editor-in-chief of a competing newspaper, Warna Warta. In 1935 Keng Po went through a period of further reorganisation. Among the changes, Nio Joe Lan left the newspaper to join Sin Po, returning to the older rival for which the founders of both newspapers had once worked. After the reorganisation, in 1938, the lawyer and journalist Injo Beng Goat became one of the new editors of the newspaper. Injo had joined Keng Po as an editor in 1934, after studying law at the Rechts Hogere School in Batavia, and he published under the pen names Intipus or Intipias because of the colony's strict censorship laws.

The 1939 prosecutions and the Hitler article

In early 1939 two editors of Keng Po, Zain Sanibar and Injo Beng Goat, were brought to court under a press offence for an article they had printed about the Regent of Pandeglang a year earlier. Almost immediately, Injo was brought before the court once again for an insulting article he had printed about Adolf Hitler, in which he called Hitler a fool who had been unpopular in school, bad with women, constantly having suicidal thoughts and an illegitimate child. When he was brought before a magistrate in Batavia, Injo was unrepentant. He did not think he had done anything wrong, but merely described Hitler accurately. Contemporary Dutch reports described the piece as an infamous article that cost its author a month. During the pre-war years Injo defended China in the pages of Keng Po and adopted a strong line against Japan and the Japanese invasion of China. Like a growing minority of Chinese Indonesian intellectuals, he was increasingly sympathetic to Indonesian nationalism during the late colonial era, rather than being a Chinese nationalist focused narrowly on overseas Chinese issues. He also wrote short stories, which he printed in magazines such as Star Monthly. The two 1939 cases, over a Javanese regent and over the leader of Nazi Germany in the same year, captured the breadth of the subjects on which a Malay-language Chinese newspaper could fall foul of the colonial press laws on the eve of the Second World War.

Shutdown under the Japanese occupation

During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, Keng Po was shut down along with most of the other independent press. Its editor Injo Beng Goat was imprisoned by the Japanese. He was arrested in May 1943 and sent first to Serang in Banten and then to Cimahi. The occupation therefore broke the newspaper's continuous publication, as it did for its rival Sin Po, which continued only in a limited and heavily censored form. After Indonesia declared independence in 1945, Injo joined the republican side and often gave pro-independence speeches in Purwokerto. In 1946 and 1947 he worked for a Dutch-language republican magazine called Het Inzicht, which was edited by Soedjatmoko. Keng Po also resumed publication in 1946. It soon grew to become one of the most-read newspapers in Indonesia and an important source of independent critical coverage, a position it held through the years of the Indonesian National Revolution and into the parliamentary democracy period of the 1950s.

Star Weekly and the Keng Po stable

In January 1946 Keng Po launched Star Weekly, an Indonesian-language weekly magazine published by the newspaper and its publisher Khoe Woen Sioe. Star Weekly was the work of Peranakan journalists who had been active in the late colonial era but had been censored or imprisoned during the Japanese occupation, and some sources treated it as a relaunching of a short-lived magazine Keng Po had published from 1939 to 1941 called Star Magazine. The magazine's first editor-in-chief was Tan Hian Lay, and Petrus Kanisius Ojong, who was editor-in-chief of Keng Po, joined its editorial board and became one of its key figures, becoming editor-in-chief of the magazine in 1951. Star Weekly became a widely respected forum for Chinese Indonesian intellectual discussion, cultural expression and critical political coverage, printed work by notable Indonesian writers of the early independence era, and reached a circulation of about 51,000 in 1958 and around 60,000 by its final year. Like Keng Po, it was loosely affiliated with the Socialist Party of Indonesia. The success of Star Weekly extended Keng Po's influence far beyond daily news, and its later history was inseparable from that of its parent newspaper. When Ojong later converted the magazine Kompas into a daily newspaper in June 1965, Star Weekly was considered a precursor to that major Indonesian publication.

Independent opposition and the arrest of Injo Beng Goat

Keng Po emerged in the era of Indonesian independence as one of the most popular newspapers in the country and a strong voice of independent opposition. In the citizenship debates of the 1950s, the two most important Peranakan newspapers in Jakarta took opposite sides, as they did on most issues. Sin Po generally favoured the treaty between Indonesia and China on dual nationality, while Keng Po, which was described as favouring neither the Communists nor the Kuomintang in Chinese politics but generally siding with the opposition parties in Indonesia, such as Masyumi and the Socialist Party, vigorously opposed the treaty. Keng Po argued editorially that revoking the Indonesian citizenship of Peranakans who failed to repudiate Chinese citizenship would create a serious problem of displaced persons. Before long, however, the newspaper chafed against the increasingly restrictive treatment of the press by the Indonesian government. In May 1957, not long after the shift towards Guided Democracy and martial law over the press, editor-in-chief Injo Beng Goat was arrested by the military police for something he had printed in Keng Po. He had reported a statement by Prime Minister Djuanda Kartawidjaja about the dismissal of Lieutenant Colonel Ventje Sumual, which was later denied by the Information Ministry, so the case concerned repeating a statement from a non-official military source rather than inventing a falsehood. The newspaper was also temporarily banned from publication at that time. After some weeks in military custody, Injo was released under city arrest in Jakarta, and he stepped down as editor-in-chief in 1958, finding the position of the newspaper untenable in the new political situation.

Renaming as Pos Indonesia and final years

In 1958, in the middle of an official campaign against Chinese language and symbols by the Indonesian government, Keng Po changed its name to Pos Indonesia, meaning Indonesia Post. Research on the Chinese press in this period described how both Sin Po and Keng Po transformed themselves by changing their names to Indonesian names as the Guided Democracy period began, and how Keng Po, under the name Pos Indonesia, continued publishing into the New Order period but could not last long because it could not compete with the New Order newspapers. The newspaper ceased publication in the 1960s. Its magazine Star Weekly was shut down permanently by the government in 1961, with its final issue printed on 8 October 1961. In March 1960 Star Weekly had printed the manifesto Towards Voluntary Assimilation, signed by ten Peranakan intellectuals including Keng Po and Star Weekly editors P. K. Ojong and Injo Beng Goat, which called for gradual and consensual assimilation into Indonesian society as a solution to ethnic conflict. Injo died in Jakarta on 1 November 1962. Keng Po was remembered as the newspaper that had challenged Sin Po's dominance of the Peranakan Chinese press for thirty-five years, that had given Jakarta an independent opposition daily in the first decade of independence, and whose journalists and magazine had helped shape the generation from which later Indonesian publications, including Kompas, emerged.