Against the backdrop of increasingly geopolitical tensions, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been vigorously moving through its first decade. Indonesia, under the leadership of Jokowi**, decided to join the Belt and Road Initiative at an early stage, and has also benefited a lot from it.
For a long time, Indonesia's economic development relied mainly on natural resources. This mode of development attaches importance to quantitative expansion and ignores quality and efficiency, resulting in excessive consumption of resources and making it difficult to achieve sustainable economic and social development. Indonesia needs to rely on innovation-driven cultivation of new economic growth points, and accelerate the transformation from a traditional development model driven by natural resource elements to an innovation-driven development model. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has strongly supported Indonesia's development transformation.
Driven by the Belt and Road Initiative, China and Indonesia have continued to grow rapidly. In 2022, the bilateral amount between the two countries will reach 1,490900 million US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 198%, China has been Indonesia's largest partner for 10 consecutive years. According to the statistics of Indonesia's Ministry of Investment, China's direct investment in Indonesia reached 82 in 2022With 300 million US dollars, China has become the second largest foreign investment country in Indonesia. While deepening cooperation in traditional fields such as goods, energy, minerals, finance, manufacturing, and infrastructure construction, China and Indonesia will carry out more high-quality cooperation in key industries such as energy infrastructure and clean energy development, including solar photovoltaic power generation and new energy vehicle ecosystem projects, and continue to expand cooperation in high-tech and emerging industries such as smart cities, 5G, and digital economy.
China and Indonesia have the ability to continue to strengthen cooperation, and while focusing on economic cooperation between the two sides, the humanistic perspective needs to be highly valued. We have noticed that around the Belt and Road Initiative, some Western-funded public reports and reports issued by some non-national organizations are "black propaganda" without objective data, and some Indonesians have taken these obviously biased reports and opinions as the main reference, which has affected the attitude of some ordinary Indonesian citizens towards China. Strengthening China-Indonesia cooperation in the field of humanities is expected to be one of the ways to solve this problem, and many measures have been taken by the two sides, one of which is exchanges and cooperation in the field of education. The number of Indonesian students going to China to study Xi is increasing. Unfortunately, there are still very few Chinese students interested in studying in Indonesia for Xi, and it is expected that more and more Chinese young people will choose Indonesia as a study destination in the future.
It has become a consensus between the two countries that China and Indonesia must continue to strengthen cooperation in the field of people-to-people relations. During Jokowi's visit to China in October this year, the joint statement issued by China and Indonesia made it clear that it was necessary to promote the upgrading of the "four-wheel drive" cooperation pattern of politics, economy, people-to-people and maritime affairs, including people-to-people and people-to-people cooperation. In addition, the two sides will continue to strengthen people-to-people exchanges and people-to-people exchanges, open more tourist routes, strengthen cooperation and exchanges between local governments, strengthen cooperation and exchanges in study abroad and personnel training, promote more exchanges and visits between non-governmental and religious organizations of the two countries, continuously enhance mutual understanding between the two peoples, and consolidate the foundation of public opinion for the friendship between the two countries for generations. (The author is the head of the China Department of the Indonesian Center for Strategic and International Studies and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Belt and Road and Global Governance at Fudan University).