1965 To 2000
After Suharto came to power, his regime created many anti-Chinese legislations in Indonesia. One of them was 127/U/Kep/12/1966 which mandated that ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia adopt Indonesian-sounding names instead of the standard three-word or two-word Chinese names. The Chinese Indonesian community was politically powerless to oppose this law. The Suharto regime wrongly but intentionally cast the ethnic Chinese as supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which he brutally defeated in a power struggle to succeed Sukarno's government in 1965-1970. By doing so, the Suharto regime - a coalition of the Golkar bureaucrats and the armed forces - extracted unofficial taxes from wealthy Chinese businesspeople in exchange for protection from occasional but deadly pogroms, such as the Jakarta Riots of May 1998.
Some Chinese Indonesians adopt western names as first names, such as Jonny or Albert, and Javanese or Sundanese names for the family names. The adopted Javanese names were often based on their phonetics, but it was not always the case. Although two Chinese individuals shared the same Chinese surname, they may adopt different Indonesian-sounding names. For example, one with the surname 林 (Lin) may adopt "Limanto", and the other may adopt "Halim" as Indonesian-sounding names. "Limanto" and "Halim" both contain "lim" that corresponds to the 林 surname (Mandarin: Lin, Hokkien: Liem or Lim = forest). Some translated their names. For example, the famous 1966 political activist and businessman Liem Bian Koen translated Lin to old Javanese "wana", meaning forest, and added the male-suffix "ndi", resulting in the new clan name Wanandi.
The Indonesianized names - basically Hokkien syllables with western or Indonesian prefix or suffix - resulted in so many exotic sounding names, that people can tell accurately whether a person is an Indonesian Chinese based only on his/her name.
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