Indonesia's Sea Lanes Give it Strategic Leverage Over China
[By Alfin Febrian Basundoro and Trystanto Sanjaya]
The power dynamic between Indonesia and China is more complex than the one-way economic dependence that some experts assume, since China depends on Indonesian waters for ships carrying its exports and imports between the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.
If the United States blockaded China in response to an invasion of Taiwan, for example, continued access through the Malacca Strait and Indonesia’s archipelagic waters would be vital to the Chinese economy. To maintain this access, Beijing must preserve Jakarta’s goodwill.
This means Jakarta has considerable latitude in confronting Beijing’s intransigence in the part of the South China Sea where China’s nine-dash line intrudes on Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone. Jakarta does not need to worry much about offending Beijing to preserve its economic relations with China.
This power dynamic has already been tested. In 2016 and 2017, Jakarta took a hard line on illegal fishing by Chinese fishing vessels, detaining and scuttling captured Chinese fishing vessels and, on one occasion, opening fire on a Chinese vessel. This all occurred in the part of the EEZ that China vaguely claims, waters that Indonesia calls the North Natuna Sea.
Despite this action, trade between the two countries kept rising. Indonesian exports to China were worth US$16.79 billion in 2016 and US$27.13 billion in 2018, while its imports from China increased by 50 percent in the same time period, from US$30.8 billion to US$45.84 billion.
The reason, clearly, was the unequivocal economic importance of continued access through Indonesian sea lanes. Ships going to Europe, the Middle East and Africa from China, and vice versa, need to pass through the Malacca Strait, between Indonesia and Malaysia, or the Sunda, Makassar and Lombok straits within the Indonesian archipelago. In 2023, 53 percent of China’s energy imports, those from the Middle East, passed through the Malacca Strait or wholly Indonesian waters. China’s dependence on the Malacca Strait alone is so severe that two-thirds of all Chinese maritime trade (by value) needs to passes through it, while shipping lines send other ships through the archipelago.
If these routes were blocked, vessels traveling to China from the Indian Ocean could only take a much longer route south and east of Australia and through the Pacific Ocean, or queue to get through the narrow Malaysian side of the Strait of Malacca, which they would congest. Both alternatives would disrupt China’s trade.
China’s dependence on Indonesian waters would become even more acute if it tried to invade or blockade Taiwan and the US responded with a counterblockade. The Strait of Malacca and Indonesian archipelagic waters would be the main arenas for US attempts to strangle China’s maritime trade in the hope of punishing it and convincing it to abandon its Taiwan invasion. In fact, a US military planner told journalist Gideon Rachman, ‘If there was a war, that’s where we’d get ’em’. There is every possibility that the counterblockade operation would extend into Indonesian waters to completely block ships bound for China.
In such a scenario, Beijing would become dependent on Jakarta and, to a lesser extent, on Kuala Lumpur, to make concrete foreign policy decisions to prevent US counterblockade operations in their waters and to allow Chinese-bound ships to continue passing through. China’s goodwill towards Indonesia is therefore vital also for improving the chance that Jakarta would consider Chinese interests in wartime. Peacetime animosity, on the other hand, would help push Jakarta into Washington’s orbit.
AI has contributed no ideas to this article. Alfin Febrian Basundoro is a junior lecturer of international relations at Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, Indonesia. Trystanto Sanjaya is a visiting fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo.
This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
No comments:
Post a Comment