Pohling Tan (Baolong Chen; 陳寶龍)

Pohling Tan is a Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst studying Chinese diasporic worlds in maritime Southeast Asia, with broader interests in ethnic politics and postcolonial social transformation in Indonesia and the region. His work asks how migration, political rupture, and state-making have reshaped the boundaries of Chinese-ness, and how communities negotiate competing claims of memory, language, ritual, and belonging across local, national, and transregional scales.

Trained across history, anthropology, and communication studies, Pohling approaches diaspora as a historically changing field of relationships. His previous research has examined memory politics among Chinese Indonesian associations and Hokkien language activism in Malaysia. His current work explores how ritual revival, heritage-making, and mobility illuminate wider questions of ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging in postcolonial Indonesia. He received his master’s degree in Intercultural Communication from the Communication University of China.

Beyond academic research, Pohling co-founded SayMin (说咱闽南话), a nonprofit initiative for Hokkien language preservation and the digital transmission of Hokkien culture, and Neo-Indologie (新印尼學), a Chinese-language public knowledge platform focused on Indonesian history and culture.

Tan, Pohling. “From ‘Cina’ to ‘Kita’: memory curation and identity negotiation in a post-Suharto Chinese Indonesian association.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2026): 1-22.

Chen, Baolong [Pohling Tan], and Lanxuan Chen. “‘Speak Hokkien’: language revitalisation and discursive opportunity structures for Chinese in Penang, Malaysia.” Language and Intercultural Communication 26, no. 2 (2026): 365–381.