As Andre Vltchek observed in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Chinese New Year offers a window on such questions as cultural identity, tolerance or lack of it on the part of the host community, and even the state of well-being, as measured by the passing of red envelopes stuffed with cash. Chinese in Indonesia have long been vulnerable, whether at the hands of the colonial Dutch administration or as scapegoats at the hands of the Suharto dictatorship, as suspected communists in 1965-66, or as too successful entrepreneurs, as in the May 1998 military-militia attacks upon the Jakarta Chinatown along with cukong-crony capitalist partners of Suharto himself. Vltchek describes a kind of “protective assimilation” response on the part of Indonesian Chinese. Actually historians have long distinguished laugeh (long time settlers from Hokkien, some of whom might also have embraced Islam) from singeh, or newer arrivals who, in turn, were also subject to assimilationist pressures. But few diasporic global Chinese communities have had to face the kind of repressive assimilation imposed by the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. In the late 1960s, tens of thousands of Chinese fled to China then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution only to be reviled as bourgeois opportunists, while most sought to melt into Javanese culture. Such appeared to be the final solution to the Chinese business community of Solo in central Java, when I visited in the 1980s. Not one Chinese character or feature (or face) remained on the main street in Solo, once a “typical” Chinese commercial street. But more than most “native” Indonesians would admit, Chinese cultural elements have also been assimilated into the Indonesian mainstream, from food (tofu products) to lion symbols, to Hokkien pronouns and expressions which enter Jakarta dialect. More than once in recent times I have observed big spending Indonesian Chinese tour groups visiting Hong Kong, speaking not Chinese but a standard form of Bahasa Indonesia among themselves. Matters are deceptive, as the same group may well reserve their native Hokkien for other destinations and private occasions. The assimilation question is a real-life problem as even newer waves of Chinese immigrants arrive in Pacific island countries from Tonga to East Timor. In 2009, for example, Papua New Guinea was the scene of week-long anti-Chinese riots, triggered by resentment that Chinese migrants displaced indigenous business. (Tonga had earlier experienced anti-Chinese riots in 2006). Typically, and Papua New Guinea was no exception, senior politicians and ministers were complicit in the illegal recruitment of mainland Chinese migrants.