[1] Toer, a humanist, engaged in political defiance and wrote essays addressing the importance of ethnic Chinese publishers in the promotion of the Malay language (at the time it was spoken of a very small minority of the Indonesian population) throughout the Dutch East Indies.
[3] Pram endured the Japanese Occupation and was detained by the Indonesian Army during the Sukarno presidency for a year in the early 1960s because of the book and its support for ethnic Chinese and advocacy against their persecution.
[1] The book was released in the wake of soft-authoritarian rule through Guided Democracy in Indonesia and restrictions on alien residence and trade.
Ethnic Chinese, Arab, and Dutch businessmen were specifically targeted during its enforcement to provide a more favorable market for indigenous businesses.
Integrationist movements led by the Chinese-Indonesian political party Baperki (Badan Permusjawaratan Kewarganegaraan Indonesia) developed but were met with a series of attacks on ethnic Chinese communities in West Java in May 1963.