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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Liem Sioe Liong's Salim Group: The Business Pillar
of Suharto's Indonesia
Yuri Sato
To cite this article: Yuri Sato (2015) Liem Sioe Liong's Salim Group: The Business Pillar of Suharto's Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:2, 312-313, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1063971
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1063971
Published online: 24 Aug 2015.
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312 Book Reviews
forms of cooperation and exchange may suffer more in the future, because of the growing trend for relationships to be commercialised and commoditised.
Nooteboom’s more valuable contributions are embedded in different parts of the book, making it easy to miss the correlations between variables. There is also a limit to how much of this book can be applied to poor Indonesians of differ -ent ethnicities, such as the C-entral Javanese, who are often stereotyped as strong
carers of relatives, or the Papuans, who are often stereotyped as dificult.
To make a stronger impression on policymakers, Nooteboom could have framed his indings in the context of existing government programs—for exam
-ple, Jamkesmas (health insurance for the poor), Jampersal (inance for pregnancy care and delivery services), Raskin (cheap rice for the poor), or Jamkesda
(local-government health insurance). Would national- or district-driven social security
it with the culture of the Madurese? Would such support alleviate the plight of the forgotten people? After all, Nooteboom does mention the state’s ongoing
Liem Sioe Liong’s Salim Group: The Business Pillar of Suharto’s Indonesia.
By Richard Borsuk and Nancy Chng. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014. Pp. xiv + 573. Paperback: $52.90.
The Salim group is a business conglomerate that was born at the dawn of the Soeharto regime. It became the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia before collaps
-ing, along with the regime, during the 1997–98 Asian inancial crisis. It has since been drastically restructured and revived. This consummately detailed book is the group’s most comprehensive history to date, centring on Liem Sioe Liong, the group’s founder, and his links to Soeharto.
The authors are experienced journalists, adept at turning information into
grip-ping narratives. They were able to speak to many people connected to the group, including Liem himself. It is well known that Liem hated being interviewed, but the authors had built trust with Anthony Salim (Liem’s third son and the group’s current CEO). The information obtained during these extensive interviews unearthed much historical evidence and corrected much basic data on Liem, who died in 2012. For example, Liem was born in 1917, not 1916 as documented in the literature; married in China in 1937, not 1935; and arrived in Java in 1938 at the
age of 21, not 22.
The book also reveals when and how Liem irst met Soeharto, details that neither man ever recounted publicly. According to Sudwikatmono (Dwi), who was Soeharto’s cousin and one of the Salim group’s ‘gang of four’ core owner-managers, his older brother Sulardi, who was in charge of military logistics in
Central Java, recognised an outstanding supplier named Liem and, in 1949
(ear-lier than had been thought), introduced this supp(ear-lier to Soeharto. As Dwi told the authors, the Salim group’s gang of four was organised by Soeharto: in 1967,
Book Reviews 313
Soeharto, at his residence, set up a chance for Dwi to meet Liem, and at the same
time chose Djuhar Sutanto, another Hokchia supplier to the military, from among several candidates to be one of Liem’s partners. This story vividly epitomises Soeharto’s level of micromanagement in establishing his regime.
The book thus does not merely enrich the Salim group’s history; it also uses the Salim group as a lens through which to examine Indonesia’s political econ
-omy. It describes, in particular, the dynamism of privilege allocation. We learn, for example, that antagonism lay behind a well-known duopoly of clove imports: Soeharto’s right-hand military man Soedjono Hoemardani had recommended that Liem take on the import rights, whereas the then trade minister, Soemitro Djojohadikusumo, had pushed for Soeharto’s half-brother Probosutedjo to do so. In response to this division, Soeharto gave the import rights to both. During
his presidency, Soeharto would carefully allocate privileges among many
can-didates, but it was Liem who developed the largest business group from these
privileges. According to Liem, he also sometimes gave Soeharto advice on, for instance, which industries were the most promising. If such a two-way relation-ship did exist, it would suggest that Soeharto was open to incorporating the ideas
of those he trusted in speciic ields, while he stood at the top of the authoritarian
hierarchy.
In meticulously following the Salim group’s revival in the post-Soeharto era, the authors show that conglomerates created by the regime can stay alive, and even grow, without Soeharto, if they have their own resources. There is no broader pic
-ture here of changes in the group’s assets, sales, or ownership struc-ture, but this omission does not reduce the value of the book. The fruit of the authors’ enthu
-siasm over many years is without doubt an important contribution to historical
research in Indonesian and Asian political economics.
Yuri Sato Institute of Developing Economies, Chiba
© 2015 Yuri Sato http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1063971
The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-Roots Up. By Ulla Fionna. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Pp. 252. Paperback: €49.95.
Political scientists have long agreed that the political party is the backbone of
electoral democracy. Given that Indonesia is in the 17th year of the post-Soeharto
period, the role of political parties in consolidating the country’s democracy is worth pondering. This book is probably the irst detailed and systematic account of how Indonesia’s political parties have operated since 1999. In a wider context, the book contributes to our understanding of how political parties institutionalise
in a country moving from authoritarianism to democracy.
The book provides a thorough account of the history of political-party devel
-opment in Indonesia, from the liberal democracy of the 1950s, to the New Order, to the post-Soeharto period. The author focuses on how Indonesia’s political par
-ties have performed in ive areas (party organisation, party activi-ties, recruitment
