The economic successes of the Suharto regime were accompanied by some shifts in the balance of Indonesian society. Observers hesitated to apply the term "middle class" either to the emerging elite of the late colonial period or to the small traders of coastal ports or market towns of Indonesia. With its suggestion of substantial commercial activity, the term seemed not to fit the elite, which, under the Dutch, appeared rather as an administrative or bureaucratic class linked--both in Java and elsewhere--to an earlier aristocracy. In addition, indigenous traders lacked the wealth associated with a bourgeoisie.

The picture was further complicated by the special position of the Chinese in rural and urban trade. The increased Chinese immigration in the 20th century confirmed the distinction between peranakan and totok communities (i.e., between those who had been in Indonesia for a number of generations and had adopted Indonesian customs and language and more recent arrivals who retained their language and remained more conscious of being Chinese). Unevenly spread across the archipelago and an ethnic minority playing a distinct economic role, the Chinese were likely to attract Indonesian hostility. After independence--and in spite of occasional outbreaks of anti-Chinese feeling--they continued to expand their participation both in retail trade and in large-scale commerce and finance.

Social change accelerated under the New Order. Along with the decline of the position of traditional aristocracies went the growth of a new bureaucracy, the rise of the army both in politics and administration and in commercial activity, the establishment of an Indonesian business class, and the presence of Chinese business interests, the latter sometimes in association with civilian or military Indonesian entrepreneurs. These developments suggested that a new--albeit extremely diverse--middle class was emerging, defined in part by economic function, by access to political power, and by a life-style of conspicuous consumption. Whether it was one class or several and whether the term should cover, simultaneously, wealthy capitalists and small rural traders, senior bureaucrats and low-level clerks, and military officers and civil professionals continued to be a matter for debate.

These developments tended to confirm, rather than to modify, the structure of power in Suharto's Indonesia.