Oen Tjhing Tiauw

Oen Tjhing Tiauw (1900–1981, ) was a Chinese Indonesian writer, politician and cultural figure active in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia from the 1920s to the 1970s. From the 1930s onwards he was sympathetic to Indonesian nationalism and worked towards independence from the Dutch as a member of the Partai Tionghoa Indonesia and later the Socialist Party of Indonesia. Biography Oen Tjhing Tiauw was born on 29 May 1900 in Malang, East Java, Dutch East Indies. He studied at a Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan school in Jombang. He continued to write plays in the 1920s and 1930s but most of them have been lost. Another charitable effort was a foundation he helped establish in Surabaya to increase friendly ties between local Chinese and Indonesians, and to fund scholarships for Indonesian students to study abroad in China every year.

He also worked for a new Chinese Indonesian literary biweekly journal published in Indonesian and Dutch called Sedar. In the early 1950s, Oen was invited by Siauw Giok Tjhan to join BAPERKI, a left-wing Peranakan party; however, he did not accept and joined the Socialist Party of Indonesia instead, and worked to build connections between that party and the local Surabaya Chinese community. A few years later, as Indonesia was attempting to normalize the citizenship status of many of its residents (including most Indonesian Chinese who had been considered citizens of the Republic of China during the late colonial period), he took an active role in trying to help those who wanted it to obtain the proper paperwork to become normalized Indonesian citizens. He was a key member of a group in Surabaya called the Surabaya Working Committee for Indonesian Citizenship which attempted to hold meetings between immigration officials and Chinese residents without status who wanted to prove their family ties to the country. The committee also sorted out issues for those who opted to remain foreign citizens (for example, with the People's Republic of China) and who may have accidentally registered as passive citizens or voters in Indonesia.

In the 1950s he became a newspaper agent.

He died in March 1981.