Kho Tjoen Wan

Kho Tjoen Wan (, 1900–1970s), sometimes spelled Kho Tjoen Gwan, was a Chinese Indonesian journalist, writer and political activist active mainly from the 1910s to the 1930s in the Dutch East Indies. He was involved with the Communist Party of Indonesia in the 1920s and may have been its first ethnically Chinese executive member. Biography Kho Tjoen Wan was born in the early twentieth century into a poor Chinese family in Brebes, Central Java, Dutch East Indies. He apparently had no formal education and was forced to start working at eight years old. By age 10 he left Brebes for the capital Batavia, where he started work as an assistant at Perniagaan, a Chinese-owned Malay language paper with a conservative ideology. The book, which criticized the controversial proposal for a conscript army of Indies natives, earned him a 3 month jail term in 1917 under the strict Dutch censorship laws.

In August 1920 he was once again called before the local court for writing critically in Warna Warta about proposals for a native militia in the Indies; he stated that the Dutch wished to turn Indies natives and Chinese into cannon fodder. As criticism of colonial authorities or policy were strictly forbidden, in November he was sentenced to 4 months in jail for "hatred and contempt of the government". Like many of his fellow journalists, he also published translations, notably in serialized form in Djawa Tengah; in 1922 his Malay-language translation of an unknown 1911 work set in Central Java called Nona Maria was published in book form.

In 1921 the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was founded; Kho, who knew its leaders from his time working at Sinar Hindia, joined it at some point during its early years. He became a close ally of its leader Semaun and was appointed as commissioner of the Semarang branch in 1924, representing the city at the PKI congress in June of that year. According to Ruth McVey he may have been the first ethnically Chinese executive members of the party. He was also active in other left-wing organizations in the city; he was treasurer of the Sugar Worker's Union and commissioner of a miner's group , and sat on an inter-ethnic respect committee .

During the period mass arrests of communists in 1926-7, following a failed uprising, he began to receive increased scrutiny from the political police. He was arrested in Kudus in November 1926 and interrogated about his beliefs and involvement in the communist movement. but unlike most of his fellows he was not exiled to Boven-Digoel concentration camp and was soon released.

In 1931 he was jailed by the Dutch in Pekalongan for participating in "racial conflicts". He was also interviewed by the political police in early 1941, not long before the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, over reports of Japanese manipulation of the Chinese press and attempts to sow discord between Indies-born and foreign-born Chinese. It seems that he had been one of the editors the Japanese had approached, but that he had turned down their offer.

Little is known about his activities during the 1940s and 1950s, which saw Indonesia gain its independence from the Dutch. In the 1960s he worked as an advisor to , a magazine dealing with mysticism.

He died in Pekalongan, Central Java, in the 1970s.