"Indonesia’s Relations With China In The Age Of COVID-19" - By CWP Alum Enze Han
Seven decades after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Indonesia and China, the COVID-19 pandemic presents new prospects and challenges for bilateral cooperation. We seek to analyse various traits in China–Indonesia relations since 2020 by examining how Indonesia attempts balancing between such cooperation and maintaining peaceful ethnic relations domestically. By tracking the domestic discourse surrounding COVID-19 and China through Indonesia’s domestic news media, the paper analyses the development of the pandemic in Indonesia, its procurement of vaccines, and, most significantly, domestic sentiments concerning Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese Tionghoa citizens, as well as Indonesia’s bilateral relations with China in general. The article argues that while the COVID-19 pandemic has created new avenues of cooperation between Indonesia and China, it has also adversely affected the domestic relations between ethnic Chinese citizens and the rest of the population. However, this has not translated into a widespread backlash toward China that might hinder bilateral cooperation.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/18681034221149751
Dr. Enze Han is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration. His research interests include international relations of East Asia, China's relations with Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian politics, and ethnic politics in China. Dr. Han received a Ph.D in Political Science from the George Washington University in the United States in 2010. Afterwards he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders' Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. In 2017, he was a fellow at the East Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea. During 2021-2022, he was Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship and British Council/Newton Fund. Prior to HKU, Dr. Han was Senior Lecturer in the International Security of East Asia at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom.
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