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In October 2013, Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, was chosen as the venue for President Xi Jinping to announce China’s proposal to build the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR), which has become one of the two main pillars of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi had just launched the overland pillar of the initiative in Kazakhstan, but he was not successful in persuading Southeast Asia’s largest country to immediately support the BRI. Jakarta gave the initiative more attention only after Joko Widodo (Jokowi) became the seventh president of the Republic of Indonesia a year later. During Jokowi’s first official overseas trip to the 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Beijing, high-ranking Indonesian officials expressed interest in linking the MSR to Jokowi’s plans to position Indonesia as a Global Maritime Fulcrum (GMF) through maritime renewal and infrastructure development.
In January 2016, Jokowi inaugurated what has been widely regarded as the flagship BRI project in Indonesia: a US$6 billion, 142-kilometer high-speed railway (HSR) connecting Jakarta to Bandung, the capital of West Java Province (Qiu 2019).1 In the initial tendering process, Japan had been expected to win the contract, but in a surprising development to many, Chinese firms won the contract.2 Initially scheduled to be completed by March 2018, the project was repeatedly stalled (see Negara and Suryadinata 2018). The Indonesian government finally announced that the railway would be operational only in March 2022.3
Despite granting China the contract for the Jakarta-Bandung HSR project, the Jokowi government’s attitude toward the BRI is still cautious. It took nearly five years after the BRI was launched for the Indonesian government to sign the October 2018 memorandum of understanding (MoU) on “Jointly Promoting Cooperation within the Framework of the Global Maritime Fulcrum Vision and the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative.” Malaysia, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Brunei had signed similar MoUs around 2017 (see the respective essays in this special issue). Jakarta even lagged behind Hanoi, which signed with China to promote its Two Corridors, One Belt framework and the BRI in November 2017.
Another indicator of the Jokowi administration’s cautious response is that Indonesia-China interactions on the BRI have remained limited, especially during the first five years of the initiative....