Sie, was a Peranakan Chinese journalist from Semarang, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).
[4] In around 1899 or 1900 he founded his own paper Sinar Djawa (which after 1917 became a mouthpiece for the Communist Party of Indonesia).
In 1902 he was also made an official interpreter of Chinese at the Dutch court (Raad van Justitie) in Semarang and in this capacity, in 1904 he was made a Luitenant der Chinezen on an honorary basis by the Dutch East Indies government.
[6] After 1910 he started writing fictionalized novels based on current events (a popular genre of literature among Chinese Indonesians at the time).
In 1913 he sold his newspaper Sinar Djawa to the early Indonesian nationalist organization Sarekat Islam.