Inside the Hungry Ghost Festival, and the Suharto-Era Ban That Nearly Erased It
On August 27, somewhere in a quiet kelenteng courtyard in Indonesia, someone will burn a paper house for a ghost they never met. It’s Ghost Day, the fifteenth night of the seventh lunar month, when Taoist and Buddhist tradition agree the gates of the underworld open widest. Ancestors come home. So do the spirits with no descendants left to feed them. For the whole month, Chinese communities across Southeast Asia keep these wandering ghosts fed, entertained, and calm. Incense. Spirit money. An empty seat left at the dinner table. Less a séance, more an elaborate way of keeping the peace with the dead.
In Singapore and Penang, this is loud and public, stage shows, towering paper statues of Da Shi Ye the Ghost King, a Malaysian temple 139 years into an unbroken streak and now pushing for UNESCO status. In Indonesia, the festival happens too, but quieter, smaller, more private. If you’re a young Chinese-Indonesian watching your grandmother do this without knowing why, you’re not watching a tradition fade out. You’re watching what’s left of something that was, for three decades, illegal.
In Singapore and Penang, this is loud and public, stage shows, towering paper statues of Da Shi Ye the Ghost King, a Malaysian temple 139 years into an unbroken streak and now pushing for UNESCO status. In Indonesia, the festival happens too, but quieter, smaller, more private. If you’re a young Chinese-Indonesian watching your grandmother do this without knowing why, you’re not watching a tradition fade out. You’re watching what’s left of something that was, for three decades, illegal.
Credit : CBC
The Ban, and the Real Reason Behind It
In 1967, a year after taking power following anti-communist purges that killed hundreds of thousands of people, Suharto signed Presidential Instruction No. 14. Most victims were suspected communists and their families. Ethnic Chinese were also targeted, blamed for ties to Beijing. The instruction declared Chinese religious and cultural practice “incompatible” with Indonesian identity. Temples were pressured to disguise themselves as generic Buddhist vihara. Chinese-language schools shut down. Chinese script was banned in public. Ancestor worship, Lunar New Year, Ghost Month, all pushed behind closed doors, allowed only “within the family environment.” Keep it invisible, or don’t do it at all.
The official reason was assimilation. That’s not false. It’s just not the whole story.
At the same time an entire ethnic minority was being erased from public life, Suharto was quietly building one of the most profitable patronage systems in modern Asian history, using a small, hand-picked group of the very people he’d just made invisible. His go-to man was Liem Sioe Liong, later nicknamed his “cukong extraordinaire.” Before every election, Suharto called Chinese tycoons to his private ranch at Tapos and let Liem collect the “donations.” “We must make sure Golkar wins,” he reportedly told an aide. “For that I will ask Liem Sioe Liong to ask donations from you.” Liem decided how much each man owed. Nobody dared refuse.
In return, Liem built an empire that came to control Indonesia’s biggest private bank, its top cement company, and the world’s largest instant noodle brand, all on contracts and licenses unavailable to anyone without Suharto’s approval. By 1998, Chinese-Indonesians, about three percent of the population, owned two-thirds of the country’s three hundred biggest companies. Most of that wealth sat with a handful of families. Most ordinary Chinese-Indonesians were shopkeepers and small traders, living under the same restrictions on their language and their prayers, while men like Liem grew richer off the government that had just made their grandmother’s temple illegal to visit in public.
When that arrangement started to look bad, Suharto had a second act ready. In 1990, he called dozens of Chinese tycoons back to Tapos, this time with television cameras, and told them, on air, to share their wealth with the poor. Same ranch, same men, opposite performance. Suddenly Chinese wealth looked like the reason ordinary Indonesians were struggling, not the man who’d spent two decades building the system that pulled that wealth toward himself.
Take their money quietly. Blame them publicly. Erase their grandmother’s altar somewhere in between. That’s not cultural tidiness. That’s a business model with a PR strategy attached.
The official reason was assimilation. That’s not false. It’s just not the whole story.
At the same time an entire ethnic minority was being erased from public life, Suharto was quietly building one of the most profitable patronage systems in modern Asian history, using a small, hand-picked group of the very people he’d just made invisible. His go-to man was Liem Sioe Liong, later nicknamed his “cukong extraordinaire.” Before every election, Suharto called Chinese tycoons to his private ranch at Tapos and let Liem collect the “donations.” “We must make sure Golkar wins,” he reportedly told an aide. “For that I will ask Liem Sioe Liong to ask donations from you.” Liem decided how much each man owed. Nobody dared refuse.
In return, Liem built an empire that came to control Indonesia’s biggest private bank, its top cement company, and the world’s largest instant noodle brand, all on contracts and licenses unavailable to anyone without Suharto’s approval. By 1998, Chinese-Indonesians, about three percent of the population, owned two-thirds of the country’s three hundred biggest companies. Most of that wealth sat with a handful of families. Most ordinary Chinese-Indonesians were shopkeepers and small traders, living under the same restrictions on their language and their prayers, while men like Liem grew richer off the government that had just made their grandmother’s temple illegal to visit in public.
When that arrangement started to look bad, Suharto had a second act ready. In 1990, he called dozens of Chinese tycoons back to Tapos, this time with television cameras, and told them, on air, to share their wealth with the poor. Same ranch, same men, opposite performance. Suddenly Chinese wealth looked like the reason ordinary Indonesians were struggling, not the man who’d spent two decades building the system that pulled that wealth toward himself.
Take their money quietly. Blame them publicly. Erase their grandmother’s altar somewhere in between. That’s not cultural tidiness. That’s a business model with a PR strategy attached.
The Reversal
The Reversal
The instruction stood for thirty-three years. It took Indonesia’s fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid, known as Gus Dur, a single decree to undo it. Presidential Decree No. 6 of 2000 revoked Instruction 14/1967 and restored Confucianism as an officially recognized religion. Two years later, Chinese New Year became a national holiday. Barongsai came back to the streets. On paper, the ban that made Ghost Month a private, whispered-about affair was over.
What the Decree Couldn't Undo
A law can be repealed in an afternoon. Thirty years of silence between a grandparent and a grandchild cannot.
In 1966, Chinese-Indonesians were told to give up their family names for Indonesian ones. Wang became Ingkiriwang. Oey became Wijaya. Lim became Halim, something that no longer gave away what it used to be. One Chinese-Indonesian scholar has written about growing up with a Chinese surname that never once appeared on an official document, not her birth certificate, not any government record, until it finally showed up on her passport in 1999. A year after Suharto fell. She says this happened to most people her age. Their real names existed the whole time. The state simply refused, for over thirty years, to write them down.
That’s the whole essay in one detail. The ban didn’t just close temples. It reached into birth certificates and decided what a person was allowed to be called, and by extension, what they were allowed to remember about where they came from. A grandmother lighting incense in a back room wasn’t just keeping a festival alive. She was holding on to one of the last things the state hadn’t managed to rename.
You can restore a religion to an official list with one decree. You cannot restore, in that same afternoon, what a mother never told her daughter because she spent a lifetime learning it was safer not to.
This year, on August 27, the gates open again, right on schedule. Nobody had to break a law for that. Ask the grandchild standing next to the altar why she’s there. If she can’t answer you, that’s not forgetting. That’s what Suharto stole.
In 1966, Chinese-Indonesians were told to give up their family names for Indonesian ones. Wang became Ingkiriwang. Oey became Wijaya. Lim became Halim, something that no longer gave away what it used to be. One Chinese-Indonesian scholar has written about growing up with a Chinese surname that never once appeared on an official document, not her birth certificate, not any government record, until it finally showed up on her passport in 1999. A year after Suharto fell. She says this happened to most people her age. Their real names existed the whole time. The state simply refused, for over thirty years, to write them down.
That’s the whole essay in one detail. The ban didn’t just close temples. It reached into birth certificates and decided what a person was allowed to be called, and by extension, what they were allowed to remember about where they came from. A grandmother lighting incense in a back room wasn’t just keeping a festival alive. She was holding on to one of the last things the state hadn’t managed to rename.
You can restore a religion to an official list with one decree. You cannot restore, in that same afternoon, what a mother never told her daughter because she spent a lifetime learning it was safer not to.
This year, on August 27, the gates open again, right on schedule. Nobody had to break a law for that. Ask the grandchild standing next to the altar why she’s there. If she can’t answer you, that’s not forgetting. That’s what Suharto stole.
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