Between Honey and Poison: Indonesia's Management of Ties with a Rising China

Abstract

This thesis examines Indonesian foreign policy in response to the rise of China from 1990 until 2016. Drawing from elite interviews, documentary analysis, and archival research, the thesis establishes how varied beliefs about what a rising China brings to Indonesia have shaped policy preferences in ways that are inconsistent with power-based calculations inherent in neorealism. Instead, the policy discourse reveals that "China's rise" is a highly contested notion. At the root of elite debates is a disagreement over Indonesia's greatest sources of insecurity. Elite perceptions of China are underpinned by a persistent sense of the state's weakness to address its multitude of governance, security, and economic challenges. While Indonesian policymakers find the strategic implications of China's growing capacity uncertain, there are profound economic and political interests in maintaining cooperative relations with China. The result has been a state response that consisted of mixed measures - that is, engagement, dominance-denial, and indirect balancing - to manage the rise of China. While these strategic choices operate at different degrees of intensity from 1990 until 2016, they have consistently remained the basis of Indonesia's China's policy. This thesis argues that the objective of this strategy is to buy enough time to condition China to behave in a manner more conducive to Indonesia's strategic interests while also allowing room for Indonesia to exploit China's growth for economic benefit and diplomatic leverage.