ABSTRACT
Indonesia’s policy towards China has also been driven in part by very different considerations to those of its two closest regional neighbours and partners, Malaysia and Singapore, which are also the subject of consideration in this volume. Indonesia’s position is distinguished, above all, by an incipient geopolitical rivalry with China which does not obtain in the cases of Malaysia and Singapore. That rivalry has its roots in Indonesia’s foreign policy elite’s sense of standing and entitlement within Southeast Asia based on an extensive geographic scale, a strategic location, a large population as well as on a national revolutionary tradition. It has been based also on an economic promise which has been set back dramatically from the second half of 1997. That prerogative stance has been combined, in some contradiction, with a sense of national vulnerability arising from the fissiparous physical and social condition of the archipelagic state which has been the source of a shared concern with its close regional neighbours about the hegemonic potential and intent of a rising China. That concern has its source also in Indonesia’s experience of past encounters with China which has generated an adverse perspective of the People’s Republic and which has informed the practice of engagement.
