and in 1965–67, General Suharto’s campaign against the Communists was accompanied by massive anti-Chinese violence including large-scale massacres, expulsions, extortion, and legal discrimination. Like several other modern Mercurian communities, the Chinese of Southeast Asia were strongly overrepresented among Communists, as well as capitalists, and were often seen by some indigenous groups as the embodiment of all forms of cosmopolitan modernity. In 1969, anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur left nearly a thousand people dead; in 1975, Pol Pot’s entry into Phnom Penh led to the death of an estimated two hundred thousand Chinese (half the ethnic Chinese population, or about twice as high a death toll as among urban Khmers); and in 1978–79, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Chinese fled Vietnam for China as “boat people.” The end of the century brought the end of Indonesia’s president Suharto, who had closed down Chinese schools and banned the use of Chinese characters (except by one government-controlled newspaper), while relying on the financial support of Chinese-owned conglomerates. The popular demonstrations that brought down the regime culminated in huge anti-Chinese riots. According to one eyewitness account, “ ‘Serbu . . . serbu . . . serbu’ [attack], the massa [crowds] shouted. Thus, hundreds of people spontaneously moved to the shops. Windows and blockades were destroyed, and the looting began. The massa suddenly became crazy. After the goods were in their hands, the buildings and the occupants were set on fire. Girls were raped.” After two days of violence, about five thousand homes were burned down, more than 150 women gang-raped, and more than two thousand people killed. 59 There is no word for “anti-Sinicism” in the English language, or indeed in any other language except Chinese (and even in Chinese, the term, paihua , is limited in use and not universally accepted). The most common way to describe the role—and the fate—of Indonesia’s Chinese is to call them “the Jews of Asia.” And probably the most appropriate English (French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian) name for what happened in Jakarta in May 1998 is “pogrom,” the Russian word for “slaughter,” “looting,” “urban riot,” “violent assault against a particular group,” which has been applied primarily to anti-Jewish violence. There was nothing unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, but there is something remarkable about the way they have come to stand for service nomadism wherever it may be found. All Mercurians represented urban arts amid rural labors, and most scriptural Mercurians emerged as the primary beneficiaries and scapegoats of the city’s costly triumph, but only the Jews—the scriptural Mercurians of Europe—came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere. The Age of Universal