Papers by Guo-Quan Seng
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2013
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Living with myths in Singapore, 2017
This book chapter recovers the political-economic thought of James Puthucheary - the leading econ... more This book chapter recovers the political-economic thought of James Puthucheary - the leading economist of the radical left faction in the PAP's united front. A close partner with Goh Keng Swee - the moderate faction's economic thinker, Puthucheary made an indispensable contribution to Singapore's First Development Plan (1961-4). During the parting of ways between the moderates and the radical in mid-1961, Puthucheary tried to hold both sides together by persuading Goh that socialists should not purge fellow socialists by undemocratic means. His insistence on the necessity of democracy for development, I argue, prompts us to rethink myths we have come to hold true on the necessity of trading political freedoms for prosperity.
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Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2020
This article analyzes the extent and limits of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) revolutionary ... more This article analyzes the extent and limits of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) revolutionary cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia. Between 1945 and 1949, the CCP intellectuals Hu Yuzhi and Wang Renshu operated a network of leftwing newspapers in Southeast Asia's major urban centers. They championed the revolution in the homeland , while supporting anti-colonial nationalist movements in the region. Taking a comparative approach, I argue that the CCP's revolutionary cosmopolitanism developed and diverged on the ground according to the diasporic community's social structure , the contingency of events in the process of decolonization and initiatives taken by local CCP leaders. While the CCP in Jakarta turned neutral in the face of republican atrocities against Chinese, Singapore and Medan went on to mobilize merchants and youths to take part in local anti-colonial movements. The CCP stood for a moderate, anti-colonial Malayan nationalism in Singapore, in comparison with a more radical, non-assimilationist position in solidarity with Indonesia's independence struggle in Medan.
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Indonesia, 2017
Here is an exploration of the micro politics of cultural belonging in West Java in the historical... more Here is an exploration of the micro politics of cultural belonging in West Java in the historical experience of one Peranakan-Chinese-lineage community over the duration of the twentieth century. This article examines how that lineage group renegotiated its belonging to West Javanese local society on the three intertwined scales of kinship connections, the provincial cult of Javanese kings, and anticolonial nationalist hagiography. The author combines recent Indonesianist studies to examine how local actors deploy “sites, bodies, and stories” to appropriate nation-endorsed narratives for the construction of local ethnic and religious group identities. The article further traces how Thung-Tubagus actors interchanged their genealogical identity between Confucianist and Javanese cosmologies, and the rise of the Chinese, Indies, and Indonesian nations, while staying rooted to West Java’s locale over time. The process of negotiating genealogical change followed not only a nationalist script but also relied on mutual recognition by the real and fictive kin, as well as by religious gate-keepers of the respective communities on the ground. Analysis at the micro level of genealogical identities reveals a heretofore unexplored provincial element in the constitution of the ethnic boundary between the Chinese and indigenous groups in twentieth-century Java.
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Books by Guo-Quan Seng
The University Socialist Club and the contest for Malaya: tangled strands of modernity, 2012
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Teaching Documents by Guo-Quan Seng
The Leiden University Library has a huge collection of Sino-Malay novels from Indonesia. Some of ... more The Leiden University Library has a huge collection of Sino-Malay novels from Indonesia. Some of them have been digitized, others not yet. This is a catalogue of the digitized titles. It will be useful for getting a partial birds-eye view of the entire collection, and for quick searches for what's downloadable from the Leiden UL website. (Compiled with the help of Research Assistant Nurul Kaiyisah binte Mohd Latip.)
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Papers by Guo-Quan Seng
Books by Guo-Quan Seng
Teaching Documents by Guo-Quan Seng