Kwee Thiam Tjing Sia (February 9, 1900 – May 28, 1974), also known by his pen name Tjamboek Bērdoeri ['Thorn Whip'], was a prominent Indonesian writer, journalist and left-wing political activist.

[7] His own immediate family, while living in comparatively comfortable circumstances, was no longer part of the uppermost echelons of the Cabang Atas: Kwee's father was only a salaried superintendent at a sugar mill in Malang.

[1][2] Kwee subsequently teamed up with the journalist and politician Liem Koen Hian in late 1929 to become an editor of the latter's newspaper in Surabaya, Sin Tit Po [id], eventually serving as its editor-in-chief in 1931.

[1] Together with Liem in 1932, Kwee founded the Partai Tionghoa Indonesia (PTI), a left-wing political party that advocated ethnic Chinese participation in the Indonesian nationalist movement.

[7] Through PTI, Liem and Kwee proposed a third alternative: that Chinese-Indonesians belonged in Indonesia and should participate in their country's national awakening and eventual liberation from colonialism.

[7][1] Although Kwee accepted the offer, he remained skeptical about his new paper due to its owner's intimate association with PTI's political adversary, the elitist Chung Hwa Hui.

[2] In 1947 in Malang, amidst the Indonesian revolution that followed the Japanese occupation, Kwee – using the pseudonym Tjamboek Berdoeri – published his best-known work, Indonesia dalem Api dan Bara ['Indonesian on Fire'].