How India should read Prabowo Subianto’s China visit

Given China’s increasing belligerence, and the ineffectiveness of ASEAN, supporting Indonesia and other Southeast Asians in their defence efforts might be the way to go for India.

Outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited China eight times in 10 years and met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping 12 times during this period. Jokowi, as he is more commonly known, visited China three times before his first visit to India — a state visit in December 2016. Only twice more has he visited India — for the India-ASEAN summit in January 2018, and the G20 in September last year.

Too conciliatory?

Prabowo Subianto, a former military general and current defence minister, was elected Jokowi’s successor in February. He will formally take over only in October, but in April made his first official trip to China.

During his election campaign, Prabowo stated that Indonesia’s “tradition has been non-alliance. We don’t wish to be part of any geopolitical bloc”. But he also pushed back against Western dominance suggesting that Indonesia which “has been looking to the West in the past 50 or 60 years”, needed “a rebalancing”, in which it had to “learn from other countries in the East such as Japan, [South] Korea, China and India”. According to him, the latter countries provided models for countering corruption, improving education, strong work discipline, and displaying national pride.

Following his election victory, Prabowo has said he would maintain good ties with both the United States and China, but in highlighting what has been called the ‘Asian way’ of employing negotiations as a way of defusing regional tensions, he, nevertheless, risks giving China still greater leeway in Asia.

Prabowo cannot be unaware of the lack of positive results for ASEAN despite the decades-long negotiations with the Chinese to conclude a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea. China has only grabbed more territory in the region in the meantime. Yet, Prabowo’s record as defence minister shows that even as the Chinese expanded their assertiveness into the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone off the Natuna Islands, he remained cautious and called China “a friendly nation”. Similarly, during his latest meeting with Chinese President Xi, Prabowo declared China “one of the key partners in ensuring regional peace and stability”.

No doubt, like Jokowi before him, the president-elect calculates China’s economic largesse is crucial to Indonesian national projects of economic and infrastructure development. While Jokowi had come to power with the idea of Indonesia serving as a Global Maritime Fulcrum, this stab at a grand national strategy uniting domestic and foreign policy objectives was soon abandoned. Jokowi seemed happy to ride on the coattails of China’s Maritime Silk Road — a prong of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) announced in Jakarta, as it happens, during Xi’s visit in late 2013. Chinese diplomats immediately and cleverly packaged the BRI as supporting the Fulcrum idea.

China’s economic presence in Indonesia has expanded as a result. It became Indonesia’s largest trading partner in the past decade, and one of its largest investors with billions of dollars in major infrastructure projects such as the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway. The Chinese have called this ‘the docking of development strategies’ of the two countries.

China’s approach

The Chinese were quick to issue an invitation to Prabowo to visit — as much a form of pressure on the newly-elected leader forcing him to declare how he would conduct policy towards China. Beijing is, no doubt, aware of Prabowo’s criticism of Chinese investments during his 2019 run for the presidency as well as his alleged role in the 1998 riots that targeted Indonesians of ethnic Chinese origin. These are pressure points that Beijing will seek to use when it feels Prabowo is straying from a line acceptable to it.

When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claims as he did during his visit to Indonesia last month that the 2+2 dialogue mechanism between foreign ministers and defence ministers of the two countries would ‘strengthen mutual understanding and support on issues involving each other’s core interests and major concerns’, he is trying to achieve two things. One, to get Indonesia to acknowledge China’s claims — illegitimate though they are — and two, to get Indonesia to negotiate bilaterally with China on the issue rather than collectively through ASEAN. These are exactly the implications also when Xi told Prabowo during their meeting that “the key to successful China-Indonesia relations is to adhere to strategic independence, mutual trust and mutual assistance, win-win cooperation, and fairness and justice.”

India’s options

Indonesia-China ties are of critical interest to India. Prabowo’s criticism of China in the 2019 campaign did not occur in a vacuum. There is a great deal of public apprehension in Indonesia about China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea and about its investments — particularly on the question of jobs provided, and the impact of mining projects on the environment — the sort of issues that India had presciently highlighted as concerns in its statement about the BRI in 2017.

It is notable that Prabowo continued his diplomatic tour travelling to Japan after China, indicating an interest in maintaining a balance in his country’s diplomatic relationships. While the current Indian ambassador in Jakarta has called on Prabowo, hopefully, India can also get him to visit New Delhi soon as a way of gauging his policy goals, and what more it can offer Indonesia by way of support.

While Indonesia’s defence links with China remain weak, the 7th India-Indonesia Joint Defence Cooperation Committee meeting in New Delhi in early May, ‘expressed satisfaction at the expanding scope of defence cooperation between the two countries’. In April, a joint defence exhibition in Jakarta saw over 50 Indian companies participating.

Given China’s increasing belligerence, and the ineffectiveness of ASEAN, supporting Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries in their defence efforts might be the way to go for India — last month also saw the delivery of India’s BrahMos missiles to the Philippines. Hopefully, New Delhi can also scale up both development co-operation and people-to-people exchanges in order to offer Prabowo and other regional leaders' greater options in their foreign and security policies.

(Jabin T Jacob is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, and Adjunct Research Fellow, National Maritime Foundation, Delhi NCR.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.