The intense competition between China and Japan in the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway (HSR) has been widely debated among academic and policy communities. However, an in-depth analysis of why China and Japan competed in the first place and why the Chinese proposal was accepted is still lacking. Based on informal conversations with experts from different sectors in Indonesia, Japan, and China, this presentation applies the concept of techno-politics to unpack the myths surrounding how HSR technology, Japan’s signature technology, was used in China’s challenge to Japanese geopolitical and economic dominance in Indonesia. Moreover, it explains how China, by winning the Jakarta-Bandung case, asserted itself as an equal, or even superior, technological power compared to Japan, thereby altering the conventional image of China as a producer of "lower-quality and cheaper products." At the same time, the presentation analyzes how the political rhetoric of "business-to-business" (B-to-B) deals between Indonesian and Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) was used by the Jokowi administration to select the Chinese proposal. This presentation argues that, in reality, the Jokowi administration relied on the creation of an exclusionary zone to bypass local bureaucracy and regulations, thereby accelerating the implementation process.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Caixia Mao is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University. Her current research investigates the politics of transnational railway projects funded by China and Japan in Indonesia, focusing on the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway (HSR) project and the Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) project. Her recent publications compare Chinese and Japanese overseas infrastructure expansion from the perspectives of policy learning and state-business relations. In addition to her infrastructure research, she has conducted research on sustainability governance and worked as a policy researcher in multilateral development projects prior to starting her PhD. As a Chinese who grew up in Japan, she has native-level proficiency in both Chinese and Japanese.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
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