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Indonesia
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat
Muhammad Zulfikar RakhmatandDikanaya Tarahita

Opinion | Is Indonesia moving towards Japan and away from China? Just follow the railway tracks

  • Jakarta is looking to connect projects being separately built by the two East Asian nations into one longer line
  • The cost of China’s section of the venture and negative local sentiment towards Beijing all play a part, as do confrontations in the Natuna Sea

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo and the then general manager of China Railway Corp, Sheng Guangzu, at the 2016 groundbreaking ceremony for the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway line. Photo: Reuters
Muhammad Zulfikar RakhmatandDikanaya Tarahita
Japan, after being outbid by China for the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project, has been working with the Indonesian government to develop a separate medium-speed line connecting Jakarta and Surabaya, East Java.
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Now these two lines are to be brought together, forming a Jakarta-Bandung-Surabaya line, in a rare Belt and Road Initiative project that will see some collaboration between Chinese and Japanese engineers.

Indonesia’s foreign affairs minister Retno Marsudi last month said Jakarta and Tokyo had been discussing the plan since May. While it came as a surprise for Japan, which has been conducting a feasibility study for the initial Jakarta-Surabaya railway to be completed at the end of this year, President Joko Widodo’s administration said the new plan was “more economically viable”.

Japan is still unsure whether it will accept Widodo’s proposed change. However, there are questions over what factors led Jakarta to change the plan, including what the Indonesian president meant in his statement.

Tokyo’s surprise is probably reasonable. While the new proposal is still currently being studied, the change is reportedly very difficult to realise.

For instance, the train configurations and the width of the track are different. While trains can travel at 300km/h on the high-speed Jakarta-Bandung railway built by China, Indonesia and Japan have agreed upon a medium-speed, 160km/h configuration for the Jakarta-Surabaya line. Other specifications reportedly differ as well, including the width of the tracks.

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A number of reasons could have driven Indonesia’s policy shift, including the delays and issues in Chinese projects. The Jakarta-Bandung project, which began in 2016 and was originally scheduled to be completed last year, was postponed until 2021 due to several problems including the complexity of land acquisition, budget overruns, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
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