Since the beginning of this century, the relations between Indonesia and China have become much closer. Trades between the two countries have significantly increased, especially after the strategic partnership agreement between the two countries was signed in 2005. In recent years, the incoming investments from China have also grown unprecedentedly, especially in the mining and infrastructure sectors. Cultural and political relations between these two Asian countries have also improved, as exemplified by the establishment of several Confucius Institutes in Indonesia, and the mutual visits between a number of Indonesian political parties and the Chinese Communist Party.

Yet critical voices about China and its relation with Indonesia are apparent in certain groups of Indonesians, who may be broadly defined as the elites. Suspicions about China’s agenda to dominate Indonesia through its participation in Indonesia’s infrastructure projects, and in collaboration with the ethnic Chinese big businessmen and politicians, are spread widely, especially among those who resent the Indonesian government’s close relations with China. What are the basis for these suspicions? Who are the groups of elites who believe in these views? How do the elite members of the groups who support President Joko Widodo see China and the latest development of its relations with Indonesia? This presentation will attempt to discuss these questions.

Johanes Herlijanto is a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. He earned his PhD in anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Johanes previously taught in the Department of International Relations, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, and in the Chinese studies program at the University of Indonesia, Depok.

His publications include, “‘Search for Knowledge as Far as China!’ Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China”, in Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia, How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing A Region, Pal Nyiri and Danielle Tan (eds.) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, Forthcoming). He also wrote an ISEAS Perspective on “What Does Indonesia’s Pribumi Elite Think of Ethnic Chinese Today?”, and “Cultivating the Past, Imagining the Future: Enthusiasm for Zheng He in Contemporary Indonesia” in Zheng He and the Afro-Asian World, Chia Lin Sien & Sally K Church (eds.) (Singapore: Melaka Museums Corporation [PERZIM] and International Zheng He Society, 2012). He is currently working on the perception of China and the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, especially among the pribumi Indonesian political and economic elite.

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Once regarded as inherently antagonistic arenas of contests, formal electoral politics and the political activism of social movements are now increasingly seen as closely intertwined. While in established Western democracies issue-based movements often form alliances with programmatic parties and complement the campaign efforts of these parties through informal activism, the nexus between movements and elections in new democracies is more commonly defined by personality-driven electoral movements that mobilize support for populist candidates for executive positions. In Indonesia, this trend has been evident since 2012 when Joko Widodo (Jokowi) won the Jakarta governor election on the back of an unprecedented mobilization of volunteers. In 2014, another volunteer movement emerged to mobilize support for Jokowi’s presidential campaign. Right now, volunteers are once again lining up to help Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) in the 2017 Jakarta governor election.

This presentation analyses this new political activism in Indonesia by examining how informal, non-partisan mobilization affects the party-dominated arena of electoral politics. Building on a conceptual framework developed by McAdam and Tarrow, it puts forward three main arguments. First, volunteer activism has added a new dimension to electoral campaigning in Indonesia which is otherwise dominated by professional consultancies and the rampant use of money politics. Second, new electoral movements are posing a challenge to the supremacy of political parties in electoral contests as they not only complement but often take over important functions that are conventionally regarded as the domain of political parties. Third, the emergence of these electoral movements are both products of broader regime dynamics as well as potential determinants of the future trajectory of Indonesia’s current democratic regime. The presentation concludes with an outlook to the 2017 Jakarta election and a critical assessment of the prospects for this new kind of activism to spread to other elections.

About the Speaker

Dirk Tomsa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. His main research interests include Indonesian and comparative Southeast Asian politics, especially electoral and party politics. He is the author of Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the post-Suharto era (Routledge, 2008) and co-editor (with Edward Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner) of The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (ISEAS, 2015).

Registration
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 13 June 2016.

INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME

 

Analysts have increasingly argued that Indonesia under President Jokowi is drifting toward China, citing Jokowi’s multiple meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s drive for greater investment from China. At the same time, relations with the United States under Jokowi appeared troubled, the result of diplomatic missteps on both sides.

While the Jokowi Administration is working hard to boost Chinese investment, it is not clear that these efforts exceed that of its predecessors, or have affected Indonesian diplomacy in areas of regional politics or security. The drop in warmth in the relationship with the US is more pronounced, but may merely be the artefact of bureaucratic anomalies on both sides.

This seminar will review developments in Jakarta’s relationship with both Washington and Beijing, the implications for regional security concerns like those in the South China Sea, and place them in the context of Indonesian foreign policy under Jokowi more generally.

Aaron L Connelly is a Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, where he focuses on Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Myanmar, and the U.S. role in the region. Prior to joining the Lowy Institute, Aaron was a director in the Asia practice and a special assistant to the chair at Albright Stonebridge Group, a commercial diplomacy consultancy headquartered in Washington. Earlier in his career, he was a researcher in the Asia programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, and a Fulbright scholar and visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta.

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ABOUT THE SEMINAR
Following forty years of censorship, the 1965 coup (also known as the Thirtieth of September Movement) in Indonesia and the ensuing mass killings have only received international attention in recent years, especially through the widely acclaimed documentaries “The Act of Killing”.  There has been a lot of uncertainty around the role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Indonesian politics immediately before and during the coup.

This seminar will first clarify the role of the Chinese government in Indonesia between 1964 and 1966 by a close reading of PRC archival materials. It will be argued that, although deeply invested in Indonesian politics, Beijing’s actual influence over the Indonesian Communist Party and the turn of events in Indonesia in 1965 was far more limited than what the Suharto regime and some English language works have previously claimed.  An investigation on the Indonesian communist exiles who used to live in China will be done by reconstructing some of the exiles’ experiences of participating in the Cultural Revolution in China, tracing some of the long journeys they took from Moscow to Beijing and then to Western Europe, and tapping into their evolving spiritual world that pivoted on the fluctuating tides of the international communist movement. Another focus of this talk is the tension between the state’s efforts to dominate the writing of history and individual attempts to steer the direction of public discourse, as well as individuals’ inner struggles to reconcile life decisions made in the past and the new socio-political environment they are situated in at the present.

Deasy Simandjuntak is a political anthropologist and Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. In 2010, she obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, with a dissertation on “patronage democracy in Indonesia”. She was post-doctoral fellow at Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) Leiden (2009-2011) and guest fellow at Southeast Asian Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany (2010). Some of her most important publications are “Gifts and Promises: Patronage Democracy in a Decentralized Indonesia” in European Journal of East Asian Studies (EJEAS) 2012, and “Milk-Coffee at 10 AM: Encountering the State through Pilkada in North Sumatra” in Van Klinken and Barker (eds) State of Authority: The State in Society in Indonesia, New York: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publication 2009. Her most recent publication is “Doing Anthropological Fieldwork with Southeast Asian Characteristics? Identity and Adaptation in the Field” (with Michaela Haug), in Huotari, Rüland, Schlehe (eds) Methodology and Research Practice in Southeast Asian Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014.  She wrote the ISEAS Perspective “Persistent Patronage: Explaining the popularity of former corruption convicts in Indonesia’s Regional Elections (October 2015).”

Ulla Fionna is Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. She studied at Airlangga University, the University of Warwick, and the University of Sydney. After receiving her PhD, she held post-doctoral positions and taught at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-roots Up (University of Amsterdam Press, 2013) and Watching Indonesia’s Elections 2014 (ISEAS, 2015). Her main research interests are Indonesian politics, political parties, electoral politics, and democratisation. Currently, she is studying the Indonesian Muslims’ political aspirations.

Diego Fossati is a Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, where he graduated in 2015, and an MA from the National University of Singapore. His current research focuses on the effect of democratization on the provision of social services in low and middle-income countries, with a particular focus on Indonesia and Southeast Asia. His research interests include the politics of development, multi-level governance, voting behavior, and social policy in young democracies.