Description
This paper examines Indonesia-China relations as a lens to interrogate the contested politics of the Global South in an era of intensifying multipolarity. Both countries invoke South to South solidarity, Indonesia drawing on the Bandung legacy and China positioning itself as a leader through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), yet their relationship illustrates the ambivalences of Global South imaginaries. Economically, China's role as Indonesia's largest trading partner and investor has delivered high-profile projects such as the Jakarta-Bandung speed train and major investments in mineral processing. While promoted as drivers of developments, these initiatives often reproduce dependency, sideline local communities, and generate environmental costs. Strategically, Indonesia's "free and active" foreign policy hedging between China and other powers, reflecting the opportunities and constraints of multipolarity. Meanwhile, episodes such as vaccine diplomacy during COVID-19 reveal both pragmatic cooperation and vulnerabilities in global health governance. This paper proposes three arguments: first, the Global South is less a coherent bloc than contested and uneven terrain; second, multipolarity reconfigures rather than resolves structural hierarchies; and third, justice and welfare-- not GDP growth or geopolitical symbolism--should be the benchmarks for assessing South to South cooperation. This study moves beyond romanticized accounts of Global South solidarity and underlines the lived contradictions of multipolarity in practice (by prioritizing, among others, distributive justice, labour's rights, and environmental sustainability).
