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In this article, I focus on the reentry of Chinese Indonesians into both politics and public religious life in Indonesia in the post-Suharto era. I argue that while entry into local politics has led to new forms of interethnic and interreligious competition, public displays of piety and religiosity among Chinese religion practitioners resonate with the religiosity of others and comply with the need for religiosity outlined in Indonesian state ideology. Public Chinese religion has become an arena of social life in which systems of morality, based in different religious traditions, become a platform to create commensurability across ethnic and religious boundaries. Performances of religiosity on the part of Chinese Indonesian politicians can be seen as a pedagogical process of demonstrating the morally and socially appropriate behavior for Chinese Indonesian political leaders in the diverse, highly religious, and Muslim-majority Indonesian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transnationalization of Chinese temples is producing new spatial imaginaries and adding cosmopolitan dimensions to Chinese Indonesian identities in the post‐Suharto era. In 1999, the Indonesian state legally‐sanctioned Chinese Popular Religion after decades of prohibition, ushering in a period of Chinese religious revival nationally backed by constitutional legitimacy. The recent emergence of transnational temple networks is providing a further form of cultural legitimacy based on symbols and statuses that circulate in a broader cosmopolitan transnational social sphere. Using case studies of three temples in Singkawang, Indonesia, each with a different form of international network, this paper shows how the transnational circulation of religious teachings, people, ideas, donations and deities can provide the raw materials for expressions of cultural identity which are locally rooted and embedded in specific ethnic politics of belonging. Forging transnational religious connections has the potential to develop into long lasting and formal institutional platforms of exchange, however, it often begins with informal, spontaneous and idiosyncratic encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]