A mixed East Timorese Chinese-Portuguese girl. About 3% of the population of East Timor is Chinese or descendants of Chinese, who also generally have Portuguese ancestry
In 2009, a TV series called "Chinese Peacekeeping Police" appeared on every household's television set, which tells the story of the Chinese peacekeeping police force stationed in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country, and many Chinese first got to know the small country called "Timor-Leste".
In 2009, the CCTV TV series "Chinese Peacekeeping Police" tells the story of Chinese peacekeeping police in East Timor, starring Sowers, Wang Luoyong and others
Speaking of which, the country may be much younger than you. Timor-Leste is one of only three countries born after 2000 when there were about 1.45 billion people born in the world. This small country did not officially become independent from Indonesia until 2002, and four words are enough to sum it up: the country is weak and the people are poor.
Timor-Leste is one of the poorest countries in the world and one of the youngest in the world
By all accounts, Timor-Leste is one of the poorest countries in South-East Asia and indeed in the world. Timor-Leste covers an area of only 15,000 square kilometers, has a population of about 1.34 million, a GDP level of only about 1.96 billion US dollars, and a per capita income of less than 1,000 US dollars per year. High levels of poverty have led to extreme instability, and despite only 20 years of independence, Timor-Leste is already one of the most chaotic regions in the world.
Timor Island
At present, Timor-Leste still has about 30,000 overseas Chinese population, and China is the only country that sends peacekeeping police to Timor-Leste every year.
In 2011, China dispatched the sixth batch of peacekeeping police units to Timor-Leste to carry out peacekeeping missions
If you are serious, Timor-Leste is not even an agricultural country, but only a "semi-agricultural and semi-primitive society". There are few decent cities in the country, and 80% of the population lives in primeval forests, living a slash-and-burn tribal life. Timor-Leste's market economy is almost non-existent, 98 per cent of the country's commodities are imported from abroad, the currency is linked to the United States dollar, and since all commodities are basically imported, Timor-Leste is as poor as a primitive society, but prices are as high as developed countries.
In 2016, the Chinese Navy visited Timor-Leste, and at the port, Timorese waved Chinese and Timorese flags to welcome them
In Timor-Leste, even a bottle of Coke costs as much as 10 US dollars (about 70 yuan), and China is Timor-Leste's largest economic partner, or "donor", so Timor-Leste even issued a set of "Chinese currency".
Due to the frequent economic assistance from China, Timor-Leste's currency is one of the few currencies in the world other than China that prints Chinese
From electricity and water to road construction and factory construction, East Timor cannot complete it on its own. In 2002, after the establishment of Timor-Leste, 97% of the public infrastructure was built with Chinese assistance, social security depended on Chinese peacekeeping police, and national security depended on the Australian military. This brings us to the love-hate relationship between Timor-Leste and another country, and that is Indonesia.
The oil development zone between Timor-Leste and Australia is Timor-Leste's main source of finance
Timor-Leste's only economic pillar is the Timor Sea oil fields, and Timor-Leste's proven oil reserves of about 5 billion barrels are less than China's annual consumption, but for such a small poor country of 1.34 million people, this is already a huge fortune, but even this little money faces the interference of Australia and Indonesia.
The Timorese army is on duty
Ninety-two per cent of Timor-Leste's population is illiterate or semi-illiterate, 70 per cent leads primitive lives, riots are the norm and poverty is the norm. When East Timor applied for independence, even the United Nations, which has always been "Buddhist", gave a rare suggestion that "independent statehood is not recommended", because East Timor is not suitable for statehood in any respect.
A primary school in Timor-Leste organized by volunteers from China and Australia
As the name suggests, Timor-Leste is located in the eastern part of the island of Timor, sandwiched between two regional powers, Indonesia and Australia, and its small territory is surrounded by Indonesia and separated from Australia by the sea. The island of Timor itself is small, measuring 30,000 square kilometers, but it was later colonized by both the Dutch and the Portuguese. After Indonesia's independence, it annexed the entire island of Timor, but East Timor finally became independent after unremitting efforts, and today 78% of East Timor's population is Timorese, 20% Indonesian, and 2% Chinese.
The main ethnic group of East Timor is the Timorese, an ethnic group belonging to the South Island branch of the Mongol race, with darker skin and flatter features, close to Indonesians and Malays
Timor-Leste has more than 30 indigenous languages, so the official languages are Portuguese and Tetum, Portuguese is a legacy of the colonial era, and Tetum is more complex, a mixture of indigenous languages, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Portuguese to form a "non-standard official language". Timor-Leste is in fact a "shell" country.
Dili, capital of Timor-Leste
Timor-Leste has few resources, but there are many natural disasters, such as floods, torrential rains and landslides. The indigenous people of Timor Island, the Timorese, themselves mixed descendants of Malays and Papuans, have dark skin and obvious Austronesian physical characteristics. To this day, East Timor still has a large number of primitive tribes.
A traditional tribe of East Timor
In the 13th century, a nation called Majapahit arose on the Indonesian island of Java, the last Hindu kingdom in Indonesia. In 1292, Kublai Khan sent a large army to invade Java, and Majapahit repelled the Yuan army, and began to expand, incorporating the island of Timor for the first time, which opened the love and hate between Indonesians and Timorese.
Majapahit was a powerful kingdom on the island of Java in the 13th-15th centuries
During the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, many Chinese entered the Nanyang region with Zheng He's fleet to the West, including of course the island of Timor. In today's East Timor, many Chinese have more or less Portuguese ancestry, which is also a legacy of colonists. Beginning in the 15th century, Portugal and Spain were the first to open new shipping routes, expanding outward in search of gold and spices.
Map of the Asian-African colonies of Portugal (incomplete)
At that time, the European market had a strong demand for spices, and Southeast Asia happened to be rich in spices, and it was 10 times the profit, so a large number of Western colonists poured into Southeast Asia, and Portugal became a crab-eating Western country. Portugal first established a colony in Malacca, then expanded outward, gradually conquering many areas.
Indonesia is rich in spices and is known as the "Kingdom of Spices"
In 1520, the Portuguese discovered the island of Timor, and after going ashore, they found that the island was rich in sandalwood, which was very popular in the southeast coast of China, so the Portuguese officially began to colonize the island of Timor for 455 years. The Portuguese influence on the island of Timor is very profound, in addition to the language mentioned earlier, there is also Catholicism.
The statue of God erected by Portuguese colonizers in East Timor, where Catholicism is the state religion
At that time, the Portuguese's greatest rivals were not the natives, but other Western colonizers, especially the Dutch. In the 17th century, the Netherlands was known as the "coachman of the sea" and had a strong fleet. In 1602, the Dutch colonists established the Dutch East India Company modeled on the British East India Company, determined to bring the entire Malay Archipelago under colonial rule.
The Dutch East India Company, modeled after the British East India Company, was the largest colonial institution in Dutch history
The Dutch East India Company had its own power to issue currency, judicially and form an army, and under the rule of the Dutch colonists, Indonesia was unified. Like India, Indonesia was never a unified country, but was united by colonizers. In 1613, Dutch colonists invaded the island of Timor, by which time the Portuguese had lost Malacca and Sumatra.
Site of the Dutch East India Company's Governor's Palace in Jakarta
In 1618, the Portuguese were defeated by the Dutch, and Timor Island was de facto colonized by both the Dutch and the Portuguese. In the end, the Dutch and Portuguese stopped fighting each other, and in 1859 the two sides concluded a treaty, West Timor became a Dutch Indonesian colony, and the Oecussi area, where East Timor and the Portuguese first landed on the island, was incorporated into the Portuguese Timorese colony.
Artillery batteries during the Portuguese colonial period in East Timor
Since then, the tiny island of Timor has been divided into east and west for the Dutch and Portuguese, and there is no possibility of unification.
Map of colonies in Southeast Asia
The Portuguese ignored social construction, just blindly plundered wealth and allowed the Indonesians to go south to occupy the land on the island of Timor, which made the relationship between the Timorese and the Indonesians very tense, and a large number of Timorese fled east. At the same time, the Portuguese chose to rule the indigenous people by political marriage with the wealthier Chinese group, and less than 3% of the total population Chinese and Portuguese formed the East Timorese elite, which attracted a certain degree of hatred among the Timorese, who also felt that the Chinese were also colonizers.
East Timorese
After the outbreak of World War II, Portugal established a dictatorship, because it remained neutral, like the Franco regime in Spain, it did not recruit the liquidation of the British and American allies, so after World War II, when the world was busy with national independence, East Timor was still under Portuguese colonial rule. In 1945, Japan surrendered, and the war of independence against the Netherlands broke out in Indonesia.
Sukarno, the founding father of Indonesia, and his Japanese wife Devi
In 1945, Indonesia declared its independence, and the following year, Dutch colonial forces returned to fight Indonesian guerrillas in the rainforest. All of them were white countries, and out of the need to maintain regional hegemony, Australia joined the war. After three years of war, unable to maintain colonial rule, the Netherlands officially recognized the independence of the Indonesian Federation in 1949.
In 1948, Dutch troops captured guerrillas in Indonesia
Regarding the ownership of the island of Timor, the former Dutch colony of West Timor belonged to the nascent Indonesia, while East Timor remained under Portuguese colonial rule. The Portuguese did not engage in economics, and centuries of colonial plunder left East Timor impoverished, first selling sandalwood and then exporting coffee, and until 1973, 93% of the population was illiterate.
Female East Timorese soldiers
In 1970, at the suggestion of the United States and the Soviet Union, the United Nations issued the Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, requiring major Western countries to give up their overseas colonial territories. The Portuguese dictatorship said that "East Timor is not a Portuguese colony, but an overseas province". With regard to the independence of East Timor, the most urgent thing is not Portugal and East Timor, but Indonesia and Australia.
The flag is waved at Timor-Leste's 10th anniversary celebration in 2012
Of course, Indonesia wants to annex the entire island of Timor, while Australia believes that East Timor is the last overseas defense line, and if lost, Indonesia will be unimpeded south, so Australian troops were allowed to deploy in East Timor as early as 1951. The purpose is to prevent Indonesia from invading the Timor Sea and even the Australian mainland.
In the 50s and 60s, in order to prevent Indonesian invasion, the Portuguese East Timor government allowed Australian troops to be deployed in East Timor
In 1974, an army coup d'état broke out in Portugal and the Salazar dictatorship fell, known as the "Carnation Revolution". In 1975, the first thing after the formation of the new Portuguese government was to pursue colonial self-determination. Happiness came so suddenly, overnight, East Timor could move towards independence without either negotiations or military revolution.
The Carnation Revolution, the 1974 Portuguese military coup, the arrival in Lisbon, and the peaceful transfer of power
However, there was a lot of trouble in East Timor, which at that time had three forces, namely the Independent Revolutionary Front, which advocated independence, the Democratic Union that advocated becoming a Portuguese Dominion, and the People's Democratic Association, which advocated joining Indonesia. The three sides could not negotiate with each other, so in the same year civil war broke out, and the Portuguese government, unwilling to muddy the waters, announced the withdrawal of troops.
In 1975, the day after East Timor declared its independence, Indonesian troops invaded and occupied East Timor eight days later
In the same year, Indonesia seized the opportunity to intervene in the civil war in East Timor, and eight days later occupied the entire territory of East Timor, illegally claiming "East Timor as Indonesian territory". At that time, Indonesia's president was dictator Suharto, known as the "cold-blooded butcher", after occupying East Timor, the Indonesian army carried out a bloody and indiscriminate massacre, even civilians, more than 300,000 people died, including Chinese, leftists and East Timorese national independents, Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976.
Suharto, the most brutal and corrupt dictator in Indonesian history
Under Indonesia's bloody rule, in order to fight the East Timorese guerrillas, the Indonesian army even used the three-light policy of the Japanese during World War II to massacre villages. From 1975 to 1980, only 420,000 of Timor-Leste's 800,000 population remained. In the long run, Timor-Leste's economy has collapsed and starving people are everywhere.
In 1978, the East Timor National United Front was formed, the leader Gusmão sought independent support around the world, Australia and Portugal did not squeak, China resolutely chose to support Timor-Leste, and finally only more than 20 countries chose to support Timor-Leste. In 1986, when the Dili incident broke out, Indonesian troops opened direct fire on the demonstrants, sparking an international outcry and many Westerners took to the streets in solidarity with the East Timorese. However, the Suharto government, backed by the United States, had no fear to go its own way.
In the 80s, Western human rights organizations protested Indonesia's brutal rule over East Timor
Because Indonesia has the support of the United States and other Western countries, poor East Timor has been forgotten by the world, no one knows about the disaster there, only China has been speaking out for East Timor.
Gusmão
In 1997, when the Asian financial crisis broke out, a large number of social problems broke out, and people were dissatisfied with Suharto's dictatorship, so Suharto's government was finally swept into the dustbin of history. In 1999, at the strong suggestion of China, the United Nations announced its involvement in the East Timorese independence movement, and then Portugal and Australia also put pressure on Indonesia, and the Indonesian Habibie government finally announced that East Timor would be allowed to hold an independence referendum, and 78.5% of East Timorese supported independence.
The tomb of St. Kurus, used to bury the East Timorese who died resisting the Indonesian invasion
Since then, Timor-Leste has entered a two-year United Nations trusteeship period, with Indonesian troops stationed in Timor-Leste on the grounds of maintaining stability, Australian troops also announcing their presence in Timor-Leste,-for-tat confrontation in Timor-Leste, and China announcing the dispatch of peacekeeping police. Only China is really doing things, Indonesia and Australia are more like a game in East Timor. Finally, in 2002, Timor-Leste moved towards independence, and only two hours after independence, China became the first country to establish diplomatic relations with Timor-Leste, and Timor-Leste also sent diplomats to China for the first time.
China has made great contributions to the founding of Timor-Leste, so Timor-Leste is very grateful to China
After independence, East Timor was once the most backward country in the world, with an unemployment rate of 70%, and even a decent central government could not be formed, and social security could not be maintained. In fact, in order to actively carry out economic cooperation and protect the security of overseas Chinese, China began to send peacekeeping police to Timor-Leste as early as 2000.
Australian troops arrest insurgents in East Timor
Timor-Leste is still very poor, and the root cause is that more than 400 years of colonial rule and 26 years of Indonesian dictatorship have exhausted all resources and capacity of this small island nation, which is not rich. According to United Nations data, about 90% of Timor-Leste's population is still farmers, and a family's economic expenses are only $100 a month.
Gusmão, the founding father of Timor-Leste and the first Prime Minister, posed for a group photo of Chinese peacekeepers
Extreme poverty has spawned extreme turmoil, and Timor-Leste has riots every three to five, so Timor-Leste needs foreign forces to intervene to maintain order, in addition to Chinese peacekeeping police, Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers are also frequent visitors.
Australian troops in East Timor
Before independence, Australia and Indonesia had privately carved up the Timorese Sea oil fields belonging to East Timor, which was life-saving money for East Timor. Although the United Nations has declared the agreement between Australia and Indonesia illegal, Timor-Leste is too small to reason with Indonesia and Australia.
In fact, even if the oil is returned to East Timor, East Timor is not able to develop, these oil and gas itself is also developed by Australian companies, after East Timor's independence, Australia still gave East Timor a bite to eat, did not let it starve to death. If Indonesia's team in East Timor is a barbaric invasion, then Australia is a full colony of East Timor, whether it is economic or social security, Australia even arranges many listening systems and undercover agents in the East Timorese government, these things East Timor knows, but helplessly, it is impossible to take Australia to the International Court of Justice.
Timor-Leste is poor, with a GDP of only about $1.96 billion, which is not as good as the US lottery maximum prize of $2 billion. In 2022, Timor-Leste applied to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but ASEAN replied that "it is allowed in principle", but in reality it is still far away, because it is simply unwilling to pull poor relatives, and Timor-Leste and Australia are very close, and people are not at ease.
Conditions for joining ASEAN
So East Timor has only one last option, and that is China. At the beginning, China was the first to establish diplomatic relations with Timor-Leste, and immediately paid 50 million US dollars, which is really no less than a gift in the snow for Timor-Leste. After joining the Belt and Road Initiative, Timor-Leste, with the help of China, has many "firsts" such as the first modern industrial park, the first national modern highway, the first modern trading port, etc., and China has provided a large number of loans and employment opportunities.
Port of Dili, East Timor
China trained the first batch of industrial workers and modern civil servants for Timor-Leste, provided hybrid rice technology, and built an industrial zone on the Chinese model, which could benefit the backward country of Timor-Leste for a century. Although Australia and Japan are the biggest "money throwers" in Timor-Leste, these funds only contribute to the chaos in Timor-Leste, while China brings sustainable development because we are helping Timor-Leste to truly grow on its own.
Indonesia and Australia, on the other hand, brought only wars and conflicts, and only the help provided by China was real money, so Timor-Leste regarded China as a lifesaver and a true friend.
The economy depends on Chinese aid, security depends on Chinese peacekeeping police, and national defense depends on the Australian army. Despite being caught between Australia and Indonesia, Timor-Leste has entrusted its future to China, because Timor-Leste understands that only China is genuinely good to itself, and Timor-Leste has the famous saying: "Heaven has God, the world has China".
China was the first country to establish diplomatic relations with Timor-Leste, and since 2000, at the invitation of the United Nations, it has been sending peacekeeping police forces to Timor-Leste to maintain order
However, China can only help for a while, not for a lifetime, as for what the future holds, it is still Timor-Leste's own historical mission, let us bless this small country with a bad fate, and truly walk its own path.
Australian troops train in East Timor