Beyond Capital Flows: Social and Cultural Dimensions of China-Indonesia Economic Cooperation in Everyday Life
Convener: Pan Yue
Co-convener: semiarto Aji Purwanto
As China-Indonesia economic cooperation intensifies under frameworks such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, scholarly attention has predominantly focused on infrastructure development, trade volumes, and investment flows. Yet the social and cultural dimensions of this engagement—how ordinary people in both nations experience, negotiate, and make meaning of these economic ties—remain underexplored. This panel interrogates the everyday social and cultural effects of Chinese investment in Indonesia, moving beyond macro-economic analyses to examine how these transnational economic relationships reshape local communities, social identities, and cultural practices.
We ask: How do Chinese investments transform local social structures, labour relations, and community dynamics in Indonesia? What cultural meanings do Indonesian communities attach to Chinese economic presence, and how do these meanings intersect with historical memories, ethnic relations, and national development narratives? Conversely, how do ordinary Chinese citizens—workers, managers, small entrepreneurs—experience and interpret their involvement in Indonesia, and what does this cooperation signify within Chinese domestic imaginaries of national development and global engagement? How do these micro-level encounters reproduce, challenge, or complicate state-level narratives of South-South cooperation and win-win development?
By bringing together scholars from China and Southeast Asia, this panel employs a comparative and dialogical approach. Presenters from Indonesia and neighbouring Southeast Asian countries will examine concrete cases of Chinese investment’s social and cultural impact, offering ethnographic insights into local responses, adaptations, and resistances. These cases may include transformations in religious practices near industrial zones, shifts in gender relations within Chinese-invested factories, changing patterns of consumption and aspiration, or negotiations of cultural identity in Chinatown economies. Scholars from China will contribute perspectives on how Chinese nationals involved in Indonesia perceive and narrate their experiences, revealing the human dimensions of what is often reduced to “capital outflow” in economic discourse.
This panel contributes to the symposium’s theme by illustrating how multipolarisation is lived at the grassroots level. Chinese-Indonesian economic cooperation represents not merely a geopolitical realignment but a site where pluriversal futures are negotiated—where local cosmologies, ethical economies, and community solidarities encounter global capital, nationalist development visions, and transnational mobilities. By centring everyday experiences and cultural meanings rather than policy frameworks, we reveal how Global South actors are not passive recipients of new world orders but active interpreters and shapers of multipolar futures.