When Jani Sutrawan stepped down from the ancient steamer in the steamy port of Surabaya on the north east coast of Java, Japan and the United States of America had just entered into World War II.
His real name was Swee Swee Boon; he was just fifteen years old and had left forever his hometown at Fuchow on the South Eastern Seaboard of China in the Province of Hokkien. He had left behind the grinding the poverty and the war against the Japanese, which had raged continuously since they had invaded China in 1936.
He was indentured to a distant uncle, whose family had established a small business as rice merchants in Surabaya at the beginning of the century. He was mature for his age, full of natural self-confidence, but spoke his Chinese dialect to the exclusions of any foreign language, or dialect for that matter, which was not unusual for the son of a modest family.
He had joined the qiaohua, or overseas Chinese, as they were called. Like many young men for generations before him, they left their homes not only as indentured labourers but also as small shopkeepers, later to become merchants and businessmen. They ran the South East Asian economies under the colonial masters, the British, French and Dutch who then dominated the region.
The local indigenous populations toiled the rich soil whilst the great trading houses reaped the profits through a multitude of middlemen, who were often of Chinese origin. They were set apart from the locals and the ruling class, in a social no-mans-land.
The Chinese often benefited from the advantages of their relative wealth and better education. Many were experienced with foreign languages and in commerce. On the other hand they frequently suffered violence as the victims of the local population, who vented their frustrations and resentment pent up under the oppression of colonial powers by attacking the Chinese and their property.
Centuries of domination were about to arrive at an abrupt end, as the Japanese, another Asian race, were poised to sweep out white colonialism forever, replacing it with their own imperialistic ambitions in the guise of their Greater Prosperity Sphere.
Young Swee Swee had been oblivious to the great movement of history that flowed over him. The Japanese invasion of China had at first been far away to the north in Manchuria, and then suddenly they were menacing Shanghai. His family’s concern had been with their own economic survival in the turmoil of the competing forces within China, where communist or nationalist war lords came and went, plundering the towns and villages, destroying the economy and uprooting the populations who fled to the cities.
Fuchow was one of the great treaty ports controlled by the British. The Boon family were city dwellers, who had earned their living from a small but declining commerce in that port, where the pressure of war had ruined their honest, traditional business.
Swee Swee Boon was the proverbial seventh son...he was so far down the line he needed all the luck he could get. He was unaware that fortune had smiled on him that day his parents announced the news that they could no longer support him.
The meagre living that the family eked out was being encroached upon daily, powerful hongs forced the profits of the family business down to the level of slavery. The news from Shanghai had been bad as the Japanese extended their war. It was best for the family that he leave for Indonesia where he could earn a small wage, which his uncle would send to the boys parents back in Fuchow, to aid them in their plight.
He had left Fuchow on a tramp steamer as a working passenger, a rare opportunity. The voyage lasted eight weeks, as the old freighter called at ports along the South China Sea, down through the Philippines and the Moluccas until it finally docked in the great port of Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies.
Not speaking a word of Javanese, was not an obstacle, he soon discovered that his own countrymen were numerous in that city. His uncle immediately put him to work as a rice porter, in the labour gangs he employed unloading ships from Saigon, Bangkok and the great cities of the north, which exported the precious produce of their rich farming lands, to the teeming millions of Java, the most densely populated island on earth.
Swee Swee worked hard, sweating under the heavy loads and the heat of the equatorial sun; he quickly learned the hard way to defend himself with the muscles he had developed from the almost forced labours that he grudgingly accepted for the sake of his parents.
He was a boy not without intelligence and realised that Indonesia offered infinitely greater opportunities than his troubled and impoverished homeland.
He quickly learnt Javanese, the language of East Java, and then Bhasa the lingua franca of the Dutch East Indies. He discovered a latent talent that would enable him to rise above his peers, his ability to communicate and his capacity for hard work, which did not pass unnoticed by his uncle.
He had barely moved up to tallyman, when the Japanese invaded Java, sweeping out the Dutch and three hundred years of European colonialism, to the great joy of the Javanese. They brought with them promises of independence, but these were short lived as the Japanese war needs imposed harsh conditions on the local population. They soon started to commandeer food, oil, timber and other resources for their war effort.
As the war progressed the economic difficulties grew. Swee Swee then discovered handsome profits could be made buying and selling rice on the black market that thrived in Surabaya, and he did not hesitate to seize the opportunity.
He had no particular feelings of love or hatred for the Japanese, whom he saw as another one of the many layers of authority that had always existed above him that he feared and respected. He carefully avoided all contact with them. He was unconcerned about war and politics, as most of the population, who understood little of the reasons for the war. Surabaya was far from the battle zone, with hardly more than a few shots fired during the course of the whole war.
In spite of the risks, his black market business thrived, expanding into tobacco, alcohol and gasoline. By the time the defeat Japanese were defeated he had already accumulated a considerable capital and experience for a young man of barely twenty years old.
Indonesia declared its independence on 6 August 1945, but its previous colonial masters, the Dutch, despite the humiliating ejection by the Japanese, a crippling war, and occupation in Europe had not yet understood that their reign was over.
The British as victors, through their alliance with the USA, were also unready to accept their own changed status and that of their old ally and competitor in the region. Together with the Dutch, they invaded Java in 1947, disembarking at Surabaya where they met with a fierce resistance from the newly independent Indonesians, who had no intention of returning to the old system.
Swee Swee quickly realised that his future lay in Indonesia. His newly acquired wealth and position were in danger, more from the Belandas, than from the Indonesians. The Dutch represented competition and control, whilst the Indonesians needed talents such as his to run an independent economy, exporting their timber and spices and importing rice and food.
During the resistance against the Dutch Swee Swee had won the respect and friendship of the young Sudarmono, the Indonesian freedom fighters regional commander, who was to become the second most powerful man in Indonesia, as the Secretary of State under President Suharto some twenty years later. Swee Swee ran guns and ammunition and supplied the fledgling army with food and clothing.
When the Dutch were finally forced to admit that their role in the country was over, Swee Swee was richly rewarded, in 1950, by contracts from the army and regional government, in recognition for his services.
As their friendship grew, Sudarmono, acquired a forestry concession of over 200,000 hectares in Kalimantan Selatan, soon after the attempted communist coup in 1965, and confided its management to Swee Swee.
Swee Swee was fortunate, that part of Borneo had been untouched by the confrontation, when Soekarno opposed the British with his claims to Sabah and Sarawak in the north and a silent jungle war took its long course.
The logging companies confined their operations to the South East of that huge island, shipping logs to Japan, Taiwan and Korea, to the veneer plants and sawmills for the payment of a pittance to the Indonesian government.
The profits were vast. Trees perhaps two hundred years old, containing as much as fifty or more cubic metres of commercial timber, delivered alongside ship, were worth several thousand American dollars. The cost of felling and transport to the coast was as little as one tenth of that price.
In the wake of anticommunism most Chinese living in the country adopted Indonesian names and Swee Swee Boon became known as Jani Sutrawan. He broadened his business activities, entering into lucrative operations with the Japanese in the early sixties, as their country rose from defeat and once again spread their sphere of newly won economic influence into South East Asia.
He continued to consolidate his relations with his other wartime army friends, who had risen in rank and began to wield power and influence within their system of trust and loyalty.
Sutrawan became their front man, investing their money and operating their businesses, in a system where the Indonesian army controlled within its normal legitimate activities many businesses. This system functioned within the framework of its mission of defence and protection of the state, with full government authorisation.
Those businesses paid wages to the army and financed its daily needs of food and other supplies. Astute businessmen, such as Sutrawan, were entrusted to carry out many of the financial and commercial operations for the generals and their staff, whose training and background had not equipped them for the role of business managers. Whatever the reason, they preferred to concentrate on the military aspects of their careers.
Sutrawan, as many Asian businessmen, was obliged by tradition to make business a way of life, and inseparable from entertainment and pleasure. Without an intricate network of friends and relations at all levels of society he could not succeed. He learnt to entertain lavishly and spread his money, buying influence at all levels of government and authority.
In 1968, Indonesia had been caught in the whirlwind of a Chinese communist inspired attempt to overthrow the government, following the disastrous failure of Soekarno’s economic policies. The Chinese community together with those suspected of communist links, were targets for mob violence throughout the country. It is estimated that as many as half a million persons met their deaths.
The Chinese community was particularly hard hit not only because of suspected links they may have had with Communist China, but also for reasons of jealousy. The Chinese controlled a large part of the country’s economy at all levels, but especially at the very visible level of the small traders and shopkeepers, which made them easy targets for the mobs.
Sutrawan, as many others, was forced to seek temporary refuge abroad. His hometown, Fuchow, in Mainland China was then caught in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and he turned to Taiwan, a natural refuge for Sutrawan, a Hokkienese, who spoke the same dialect as that of the islands native population. Once again he did not miss the occasion, cultivating and enlarging his circle of business friends, whilst waiting for the situation to return to normal in Indonesia.
In spite of resentment against the Chinese, the Indonesians were not yet sufficiently experienced to develop all aspects of the country’s economy. After the situation had returned to normal, the government, under the new President, Suharto, allowed the Chinese to return and re-establish their businesses.
The majority of Indonesia’s population was Moslem. There also existed a Christian minority of about five percent, as well as smaller Hindu minorities, mainly on the island of Bali. Animist cults also existed in a great many of the outlying islands and remote regions of the country. According to the national philosophy of Pancasila there was no state religion.
The Moslems had general considered that commerce and certain liberal professions, such as law and accountancy, were not compatible with the tenets of Islam. The Chinese were excluded from government service because of their non-Indonesian origins and consequently took up the only professions that remained open for them. The result was that over the years the wealth of the Chinese grew, through their business and commerce, as the poorer uneducated Indonesian classes looked on, with a sense of exclusion and often an understandable envy.
The government’s attitude was to pay lip service to public opinion, whilst the politicians took advantage of the gains to be made in cooperating, behind the scenes, with the Chinese.
The Chinese had also the added advantage of their overseas network of relations and business contacts throughout South East Asia and even as far as the West Coast of the USA, and Europe.
The major consequence of the turmoil in Indonesia had been the forced resignation of Soekarno, its first president, under pressure of the army, following the murder of seven army generals, which was resulted in the nomination of General Suharto as the new President of Indonesia.
The task that faced Suharto was a daunting one, as the country’s economy had all but collapsed. It was not the moment to reject the only people qualified to run a large part of the business and commerce of the country’s economy, and make it prosper. The men in power did not hesitate to quietly encourage the Chinese to return, whilst bowing to public opinion through the introduction of laws that made life difficult for many of the less privileged Chinese.
Indonesia had a vast reserve of natural resources; it was endowed with oil, gas and other resources in abundance, such as timber, rubber, tin and agriculture. The world demand was great and the country soon controlled its inflation, aided by the USA with generous loans from the World Bank. The West, at the height of the Vietnamese war, feared the domino effect, which seemed very real in view of Indonesians strategic importance and economic potential.
Soon after Sutrawan’s return the economy was booming and the newly founded state oil company Pertamina was tapping huge wealth through its wells and new refineries. With the first world oil crisis and the explosion of oil prices, Indonesia with its oil reserves became the target of western investment and businessmen soon flocked to the country to join in the bonanza to be reaped.
Sutrawan’s wealth grew, as did his international reputation. Foreigners seeking local partners for their investment projects were eager to meet him, as not only did he have capital, but he also had powerful friends in high government places. He knew his way through the administrative maze of the country’s bureaucracy, paying careful attention to the needs of the middle and lower functionaries.
One success followed another; soon he counted amongst his investments the largest wood panel factory in the country in joint-venture with Taiwanese, textile mills with Singaporeans, motor vehicle tyres with Koreans, and electronic components with Japanese.
Sutrawan was encouraged by his political friends to invest in a paper mill in the late seventies. The country needed printing and writing paper. He turned to his friends in Taiwan, Guo Min who proposed that they both join together with the Gao family.
The arithmetic was simple, Sutrawan added value at each phase, cutting the wood in Indonesia, shipping it to Taiwan, where it was transformed it into paper pulp, which they exported through a Hong Kong trading company, shipping it back to Indonesia for paper making, at world market prices. The result was substantial tax free profits all round.
It was an unlikely combination, Sutrawan a newly rich industrialist risen from humble background, and Gao’s old established family with its business stretching back almost a century, backed by the weight of a semi-state owned Taiwanese company.
Sutrawan supplied the local knowledge and the Indonesian markets, Gao the production skills and technology and the Taiwanese banks the loans. As in all his ventures, Sutrawan invested little but his reputation and his political contacts, which he exchanged for a financial stake in the equity.
The structure had become Sutrawan’s standard method in creating joint-ventures with foreign investors. He operated from a position of strength, he was on his home ground, in effect he was buying and they were selling, and he could dictate his own terms and conditions once the business was underway.
The Taiwanese did well in the system, supplying the machinery and equipment for the paper mill. Once production had got underway they also delivered the paper pulp to the mill, providing a pipeline to divert profits overseas to Hong Kong, and naturally through the bank the Sutrawan and his friends operated in Indonesia and overseas, the Surabaya Mas Bank.
Indonesia had a so-called open economy, with virtually no foreign exchange controls, for those Indonesians who could influence the system and for foreigners. This permitted the free movement of monies, which encouraged investment and the growth of the country’s international trade and commerce. It also enabled the rich like Sutrawan to put their accumulated wealth into overseas tax shelters and havens, as a hedge against frequent and large devaluations of the Indonesian Rupiah.
Ennis had gravitated to Sutrawan, thanks to S.C.Gao, attracted by his group’s qualifications as a potential joint-venture partner. Papcon had sought a partner with three essential qualities; political influence to obtain support for the project, financial power, the road was long and costs would be great, and a partner already well established in the local forestry and paper industries.
The knowledge and experience of such a partner was vital for the bankers. There was in addition an unspoken point, the need to have partners open to Papcon’s way of thinking, a person who would lose no sleep at night in bending a few rules. Sutrawan had all of those qualities and certainly a few more that they had not even thought of.
S.C.Gao had informed Jakarta that Ennis would contact them. However, once in Jakarta it was easier said than done. His calls ran up against a barrier designed to protect Sutrawan, filtering all newcomers and keeping out unwanted intruders.
It was a certain Danny Lau who determined who met Sutrawan, he was his right hand man; if Lau felt that a person had some business potential he first discussed it with Sutrawan, who if he agreed instructed Lau to set up an informal meeting. Danny Lau was a short effervescent Hokkienese, whose family had fled the communist take over in China in 1949 to Indonesia, where he arrived as a young boy with his father in 1950.
Danny Lau finally returned his calls and messages left with Sutrawan’s secretaries. After a brief conversation Lau said he would report to Sutrawan. Later that same day he called back and asked Ennis to be on stand by in the lobby at seven thirty, it was a signal that was to become very familiar.
It was the first visit Ennis made to the Jakarta office of Sutrawan. The ‘office’ was the Blue Ocean, a cavernous Chinese restaurant and nightclub. Two dance orchestras seated on a rotating stage, took it in turns to accompany a series of pretty Chinese singers, between a succession of nightclub acts, magicians, jugglers and acrobats. For those night clubbers who paid the taximeter, there was no shortage of pretty dancing partners, who could be chosen by numbers, through a large glass window. The girls then joined their customers at their tables for the evening.
In the semi-darkness Ennis was led by Danny Lau to one of the large round Chinese style tables, which as far as he could make out in the dim light was already surrounded by a several men, all of whom were Asians. Danny quickly introduced the confused Ennis, through the noise of the music and the bustling of waiters, to the other guests, quickly announcing a string of incomprehensible names.
He informed Ennis that Sutrawan had not yet arrived, but not to worry, he would soon be there. In the meantime they drank warm Chinese tea in glasses that Danny poured from a large ornate teapot.
Thirty minutes later Sutrawan arrived. He was a man of an age that was difficult to fix, and as with many Asians he appeared younger than his age, he looked to be about forty-five, though probably much more thought Ennis. His hair was swept back and lacquered down, an energetic man with a force of character that was projected to those around him, as he smiled and waved to his friends. He knew everybody and everybody knew Sutrawan.
Danny very tactfully explained to Ennis that the first thing to be understood was that in the office and on all such occasions, no one ever talks about business, except in the most indirect manner. Relations were being cemented by the very presence of his guests, serious business was left to more discrete moments, before or after, when a few words were sufficient to transmit a request or a need, or to give acceptance or refusal. Danny simply acted as interpreter.
Ennis soon found that the main function of the office meeting was to laugh, eat, drink and dance, and if there were any real problems an appointment could be fixed for the next day. In most cases this was delegated to Danny or one of his lieutenants.
The favourite drink of Sutrawan’s was Hennessey XO cognac, at over one hundred dollars a bottle, in the duty free in Singapore. Sutrawan, with his personal fortune estimated at some fifty million dollars never forgot, or could forget the misery and poverty of Fuchow, or his sweated labour as a porter in the Port of Surabaya, when a few Rupiah meant the difference between starving and eating, baulked at the ruinous prices in restaurants and night clubs of his favourite drink, which was tripled or quadrupled.
It was one of Danny’s informal functions to ensure a steady supply of XO for all occasions, and friends and members of Sutrawan’s entourage were encouraged to stock up with at the duty free shops each time they passed through the airports of Singapore, Hong Kong or Taipei.
Ennis was amused at what French connoisseurs of cognac could have learnt from the Chinese of Hong Kong or Singapore, who had developed to a fine art the consumption of the spirit. It was drunk in approximately the same manner as the French would have drunk wine, by the glass and in about the same quantities.
That first evening was particularly memorable; Jakarta was in the middle of the Asian Film Festival. The Blue Ocean was crammed with personalities from the Asian cinema world. Sir Run Run Shaw, the Hong Kong film magnate, made a spectacular appearance in the lights and the cameras of the television reporters. Asian cinema Stars were present in force, as Sutrawan stood out surrounded by a flock of starlets and flashy Taiwanese nightclub singers.
The cognac flowed and bottle after bottle appeared on their table produced as if by magic from Danny’s hidden reserve. Ennis was soon in a slightly intoxicated daze after returning each toast proposed in his honour as a western guest. He had imagined that he had become accustomed to oriental entertainment, but that evening was a new experience. To his embarrassment, on returning from a visit to the mens room, he sat mistakenly at another table and happily continued to drink the cognac of the other party without realising his error, until Danny came to rescue him apologising to the revellers at the other table, amid much embarrassed laughter and leg pulling.
Ennis never did find out who Sutrawan’s guests were that evening. He vaguely understood that they were from Hong Kong and Taiwan. There was not much English spoken, just laughing and drinking, between an endless flow of steaming dishes of Chinese food, followed by a stream of hostesses, who took turns to dance with the guests.
The evening was long; they did not leave the Blue Ocean until after two in the morning. Sutrawan took Ennis in his chauffeur driven Mercedes and dropped him off, as an honoured guest at the Borobudur. He could barely remember getting to his room and he did not wake up until ten the following morning.
Ennis had a business philosophy, which was particularly well suited to business relations with Sutrawan. He preferred travelling alone for different reasons. One being that many executives, and especially the French, felt deeply engaged by the obligation of presence in their jobs, even fifteen thousand kilometres from their offices. Most were up, shaved and dressed in suit and tie, taking breakfast at eight every morning, even when they had no particular appointment scheduled for the day. When they were busy, and when the last meeting of the day had ended, they estimated that their job was complete and headed home, to their hotel room.
To Ennis it seemed that they had little or no imagination, no curiosity or desire to see what they would discover if they accepted their hosts invitations, by develop less superficial relationships.
The other reason was that surprisingly the French did not drink, of course they drunk a cocktail, one or at the very most two, and naturally a little wine with their meals. However, they drank less and less of the traditional cognac after dinner, which seemed to have become a custom reserved solely for foreigners. He knew that the French were not social drinkers, at least in same the sense that many of their European neighbours were. They could not compete with those to the north, or the British and Americans, not overlooking the Australians, where not to enjoy several good beers was quite frankly odd.
Ennis was of the opinion that the French considered, in their Cartesian manner, that it was trop ennuiant or a waste of time, to pass an evening in the company of people such as Sutrawan. They figured that a polite lunch in the formality of the French restaurant at the Hilton or Mandarin was what was required, and to everyone’s taste, almost as business entertainment was not really necessary at all.
For them spending an evening with their business partners, who spoke an incomprehensible English, where they the French had little chance of participating in the conversation, or being obliged to avoid conversation on the only subject they had in common - business - was unsupportable.