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Indonesia
This Week in AsiaPolitics

China’s growing sway over Indonesian media raises fears of ‘silencing’, threats against reporters

  • China wants to influence local coverage on the treatment of Uygurs in Xinjiang and Indonesia’s belt and road projects, an analyst says
  • A number of Indonesian media outlets have reportedly been intimidated over their coverage of problematic belt and road projects

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President Joko Widodo at the launch on October 2 of Indonesia’s high-speed railway at Halim station in Jakarta, a key project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Photo: AP
Resty Woro Yuniar
A year after a report revealed China’s growing influence over Indonesian media, journalists and analysts are again raising the alarm over what they perceive is Beijing’s continuous sway on local news coverage.
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The report, published in September last year by Freedom House, a Washington-based NGO that promotes democracy and human rights, found that Beijing had between 2019 and 2021 “successfully pushed for new agreements with the country’s national news agency and a major free-to-air television network, opened new diplomatic social media accounts, and appealed to Indonesia’s Muslim community through trips to Xinjiang that presented a government-controlled perspective of the region”.

“There are multiple objectives to this, but the main objective is to make the world safer for the Chinese Communist Party, to be able to invest abroad and have countries welcome Chinese investments,” said Sarah Cook, Freedom House’s senior adviser for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, at an event last Wednesday hosted by Jakarta-based think tank Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios).

According to Zulfikar Rahmat, Celios’ director of China-Indonesia Studies, Beijing’s efforts to push for positive narratives about China in Indonesia were ongoing and focused on two particular issues: the treatment of the Uygur Muslim minority in Xinjiang and Indonesia’s participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“China wants to push the narrative that the situation in Xinjiang is fine and that the news related to the human rights issue in Xinjiang is Western propaganda,” Zulfikar said.

“Second, they want to push the narrative that [the belt and road] is providing benefits to Indonesia, especially in the context of the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed train. There have been several attempts to cover up stories related to problems with the high-speed train.”

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The US$7.2 billion train project, officially named Whoosh, is the flagship belt and road project in Indonesia. Its commercial operations started on October 17 after years of delay and overshot budgets.
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