Description
Indonesia-China nickel industry cooperation has been praised as a fresh model of cooperation, allowing a developing country like Indonesia to upgrade its position in the global critical minerals chain. However, critics have shown how it also produces exclusion, generates inequality, and damages the environment, making the project resemble an enclave than a successful national industrial endeavor. This problematizes the promising success narrative surrounding the two countries' cooperation. Enriching this critical literature, this research explores an underexplored aspect of the Indonesia-China nickel industry: the labour regime. Drawing on one month of fieldwork at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), this paper makes two arguments. First, tracing the historical development of extractive labour regimes, it shows that IMIP's labour regime converges with the broader neoliberalization of extractive labour globally. Second, while reproducing this neoliberal logic, IMIP does so through a specific spatial modality: the industrial park. Both realities, the paper argues, stem from the political economy of the Indonesia-China labour encounter: China's industrial park model, centralized politics of Indonesia's downstreaming agenda, and the casualization of labour law. Lastly, this paper enrich the debates on Indonesia-China cooperation: its celebrated success rests on the exploitative neoliberal model rather than a new emancipatory one.