About Sin Po

Sin Po

Sin Po was a Peranakan Chinese newspaper published in Malay in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies, and later in Jakarta, Indonesia. Its name, written in Chinese characters as a phrase meaning the news, was rendered in Hokkien as Sin-po. The newspaper was founded on 1 October 1910 and was published first as a weekly and then, from 1912, as a daily broadsheet. For several decades it was one of the most widely read Malay-language newspapers in the Indies. It expressed the viewpoint of Chinese nationalism, defended the interests of Chinese Indonesians, and was frequently in conflict with more conservative sections of the Chinese community and with the colonial authorities. The newspaper ceased publication during the Japanese occupation period in its first life, was relaunched after the Second World War in 1946, and continued under changed names after 1958 until its final closure on 1 October 1965. Modern media outlets that later adopted the Sin Po name were separate undertakings and were not a continuation of the historic newspaper described here.

Founding in Batavia in 1910

Sin Po was founded in Batavia on 1 October 1910. The idea for the newspaper came from Lauw Giok Lan, who approached Yoe Sin Gie to help establish it. Both men had previously worked at Perniagaan, a conservative Chinese newspaper that was closely allied with the Chinese Officer system and with the Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan, the influential Chinese community organisation. When Sin Po was launched, Lauw took on the editorial duties and Yoe handled the administrative side of the business, while Hauw Tek Kong served as director. At first the newspaper appeared only once a week. It quickly became very successful with readers. Lauw was an experienced publisher before he founded Sin Po. He had worked for the Van Dorp company, which had published Java Bode and Bintang Betawi, and he had been editor of Perniagaan since 1907. That background in both Dutch-language and Chinese-Malay publishing in Batavia gave the new weekly an established network of printers, writers and readers from its earliest issues, and the front covers of its first and fourth issues, both dating from October 1910, survived as evidence of how quickly the title was established in the capital.

Becoming a daily under J. R. Razoux Kühr

In 1912 Sin Po became a daily newspaper, and it hired a European, or Indo, editor-in-chief, J. R. Razoux Kühr. Appointing a European editor was standard practice among Malay newspapers of the time, because the higher legal status of Europeans meant that legal punishments for contravening the colonial press laws would fall less harshly upon them than upon Chinese or indigenous editors. Razoux Kühr was a distinctive figure. He was a former civil servant who had fallen into disgrace and had written an English-language booklet denouncing the Dutch system of laws. Despite that reputation among Europeans, he had good relations with the Peranakan Chinese community, was an excellent writer, and spoke several languages. His tenure was controversial from the start. By late 1912 he had already been called before the court for printing defamatory content in Sin Po, in an article that had described the murder of a Chinese person in Sukabumi and was said, by its factual description, to stir up hatred against the Indies government. In March 1916 Razoux Kühr stepped down as editor, ostensibly for health reasons. Although he was announced as editor-in-chief of the rival newspaper Perniagaan in 1918, that appointment was apparently short-lived, and he never again held a prominent editorial job.

Conflict with the Chinese Officer system

In early 1913 Sin Po entered a bitter feud with more conservative elements of the Chinese community because of its criticism of the colonial Chinese Officer system, under which the Dutch appointed Chinese officers to administer their own community. The feud resulted in calls to boycott Sin Po. The newspaper harshly attacked Phoa Keng Hek and Khouw Kim An, two high-profile Chinese Officers, and accused them of corruption and abuse of authority. One Sin Po editor was forced to resign from the board of the Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan and was then expelled as a member of the organisation. The rivalry with Perniagaan, the newspaper from which Sin Po's founders had come, continued on other fronts as well. By 1915 Perniagaan was accusing Sin Po, under Razoux Kühr, of accepting payment for its reporters to travel. It printed what it presented as proof in one case, a receipt for payment of a Sin Po journalist to travel to Garut, where the journalist was hosted by the local Chinese community and directed to investigate a district head who had been mistreating them. Because Razoux Kühr was already a pariah in the European community, the accusation added to suspicions that he was an unscrupulous figure. The disputes showed how central Sin Po had already become to arguments within the Indies Chinese community about loyalty, authority and representation.

Kwee Hing Tjiat and the Chinese nationalist line

When Razoux Kühr stepped down in March 1916, Sin Po gained its first Chinese editor, Kwee Hing Tjiat. Kwee was a lifelong journalist who by 1916 had already been editor of Bok Tok and Tjhoen Tjhioe in Surabaya as well as Palita in Yogyakarta. Under his tenure the newspaper took on an even more aggressively Chinese nationalist line. It continued to develop a strongly pro-Peking and pro-Totok Chinese position and to harshly criticise the Chinese Officer system, so its bitter feud with Perniagaan continued. The historian Leo Suryadinata noted that Sin Po came to lead a distinct grouping at this time, which he termed the Sin Po group. In his account, that group believed in Peranakan and Totok unity, in Chinese-language education among the Peranakan, and in non-participation in local Indies politics. Kwee stepped down from his position in 1918 and went to work for a private company called Hoo Tik Thay. His editorship had set the direction that defined Sin Po for much of its colonial-era life, as a newspaper that looked towards China for political orientation while speaking to a Malay-reading Peranakan audience in the Indies.

Tjoe Bou San, the Chinese edition and expansion

In 1919 Tjoe Bou San, who had previously been editor-in-chief of Tjhoen Tjhioe and Hoa Tok Po, took up the editor-in-chief position at Sin Po. He had already been working at the newspaper at a lower level since his return from China in 1918. When the director Hauw Tek Kong was barred from re-entering the Indies after a visit to China, Tjoe briefly became director of the newspaper as well as its editor-in-chief. It was under his tenure that Sin Po launched its Chinese-language edition in February 1920. Lie Chen Fu was the first editor-in-chief of that edition, followed by Chuang Yu Lin from 1921 to 1927 and Hsieh Tso Yi from 1927 to 1929. That Chinese edition quickly became the most influential newspaper of its kind in the Indies. In 1922 Ang Jan Goan joined the editorial board. One of his first innovations was to launch an East Java edition of the newspaper in Surabaya in 1922, edited by Lim Bok Sioe, as well as a new daily newspaper called Bin Seng in Batavia, which was intended to cover local news in the capital. Bin Seng was also edited by Tjoe Bou San, under the pseudonym Oen Tjip Tiong, but it did not last long. The newspaper also launched a new weekly publication in April 1923, and its weekly edition became a long-running companion to the daily.

Kwee Kek Beng and the turn towards Indonesia

When Tjoe Bou San died in 1925, Kwee Kek Beng became editor-in-chief, while Ang Jan Goan was promoted to director. Both men remained in those positions for several decades. Kwee Kek Beng was a Dutch-educated former schoolteacher who had been a contributor to Bin Seng and Java Bode before he was hired as a junior editor at Sin Po in 1922. Like his predecessors, he was a strong Chinese nationalist. By the second half of the 1920s, however, as the Indonesian nationalist movement gained strength, Sin Po moderated its pro-China line and became more sympathetic to the Indonesian perspective. Kwee himself was a close personal friend of Sukarno and other leaders of the Indonesian movement. Counterparts at Djawa Tengah in Semarang also became more Indies-oriented, and many members of the Sin Po group who had advocated that Peranakan Chinese should go back to China for work and education gave up that campaign. In January 1927 the newspaper launched another publication, De Chineesche Revue, a weekly journal published in European languages, including Dutch, in which Chinese intellectuals could discuss the issues of the day in a more serious manner. Kwee was the driving force behind the journal, having seen how many intellectual journals were published in the Netherlands and believing that Indies Chinese writers were capable of writing at that level as well. The Sinologist Henri Borel was influential in the journal for a time.

Fundraising against Japan and the occupation years

In the late 1930s Sin Po shifted its campaigning towards fundraising for China and spreading an anti-Japanese message among its Indies Chinese readership. The newspaper raised 1.7 million guilders between 1937 and 1942 for the Chinese war effort against Japan. Its cultural presence also widened in this period. A comic strip called Put On, by Kho Wan Gie, began to be serialised in Sin Po from 1931 onwards and became one of its best-known features. During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, Kwee Kek Beng avoided arrest and hid in Bandung from 1942 to 1945. Sin Po continued to publish in a limited form, without an editor-in-chief and constrained by strict Japanese censorship. Another newspaper, Kung Yung Pao, edited by Oey Tiang Tjoei, briefly took the place of Sin Po in Batavia society during that era and served as a daily newspaper for the ethnic Chinese population of Java under the occupation administration. After the war ended, Sin Po resumed publication and Kwee returned to his position, but he fell into a feud with the publisher Ang Jan Goan and resigned as editor-in-chief in 1947. He was briefly replaced by Thio In Lok, who departed after nine months, and his longer-term replacement was a veteran journalist named Gouw Tiauw Goan, who had been educated in China, had been interned by the Japanese during the war, and whose written contributions while editor focused more on China.

Independence, arrests and the name changes

Sin Po continued after Indonesian independence, but its position became increasingly difficult. In August 1951 several of its editors were arrested and held without charge as part of mass arrests of leftists and Chinese Indonesians ordered by the Soekiman Cabinet. Those arrested included the editors A. Karim, Tjia Tjo Soen, Lieng Jing Chen, Lee Swie Kee and Oen Tek Hian, as well as the director Ang Jan Goan. In the debates of the 1950s over the citizenship of Chinese Indonesians, Sin Po, which was described in contemporary analysis as a pro-Peking newspaper, generally favoured the treaty between Indonesia and China on dual nationality, while its great Batavia rival Keng Po vigorously opposed it. In 1958 the newspaper was forced to change its name because of government regulations directed against Chinese names and symbols. It became Pantjawarta, and then Warta Bhakti. In that later era the newspaper took a pro-PKI line, aligned with the Indonesian Communist Party, and it was therefore banned in the crackdown that followed the September 30 Movement in 1965. Its final closure was dated 1 October 1965, exactly fifty-five years after its first issue had appeared in Batavia.

Legacy and surviving collections

Sin Po was remembered as one of the defining newspapers of the Peranakan Chinese press in the Indies. It had begun as a breakaway weekly founded by journalists who had left a conservative rival, had become a daily within two years, had added an influential Chinese-language edition, an East Java edition and a European-language review, and had survived changes of editor, colonial court cases, boycott campaigns and wartime censorship before it was finally closed in independent Indonesia. Its history traced the wider arc of the community it served, from Chinese nationalism and loyalty to Peking, through a gradual reorientation towards Indonesia in the late 1920s, to the citizenship debates and political pressures of the 1950s. Collections of the newspaper survived for researchers. Monash University Library held Sin Po weekly news issues from April 1923 to February 1942 in hard copy and issues from May to December 1950 on microfilm, and digitised collections of its weekly magazine issues from 1923 to 1941 and of daily issues from 1948 to 1954 were made available through research libraries. The advertisements in surviving issues, typically for natural and alternative medicines, beverages, cosmetics, clothing and tobacco, also preserved a record of the commercial world of its readers. From 2023 two Indonesian companies used the Sin Po name for new media ventures, a web portal and a television channel, but those outlets were modern namesakes and not the historic Malay-language daily that had closed in 1965.