On May 28, 2026, a lecture titled “Chinese and Japanese Infrastructure Financing Governance in Indonesia: Organizational Coalitions, Institutions, and Ideology” was held in Room 111, Building 1, at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. The School of Foreign Languages, the School of International Studies, the Guanghua School of Management, and the Institute for Indonesian-Malaysian Cultural Studies jointly organized the event. Dr. Trissia Wijaya, Research Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, delivered the lecture. Tenured Associate Professor Xie Kankan from the School of Foreign Languages chaired the session, and Professor Zha Daojiong and Tenured Associate Professor Chen Muyang from the School of International Studies joined as discussants.

Drawing on her recently completed book, The Political Economy of Japanese and Chinese Infrastructure Financing Governance, Dr. Wijaya reviewed two dominant strands of scholarship. The first examines how China and Japan use infrastructure financing to expand their regional influence and highlights the differences between Chinese financing practices and OECD standards. The second explores how recipient countries, including Indonesia, respond to and reshape external investment. She argued that both perspectives rely on overly simplistic binary assumptions and therefore fail to capture the political dynamics embedded in infrastructure finance.

To address this limitation, Dr. Wijaya introduced the concept of a “regulatory complex,” shifting the analytical focus to power relations among different social actors and forms of capital. She categorized capital in infrastructure markets into four types––international capital, investment-constrained capital, market-constrained capital, and state capital––and used this framework as the basis for comparative analysis.

Dr. Wijaya identified three historical phases in Japan’s infrastructure financing engagement with Indonesia. During the Cold War, Japan relied on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and forged alliances with Indonesia’s “Berkeley Mafia” technocrats to embed projects within the country’s national development plans. Following the oil crises, Japan shifted toward an Other Official Flows (OOF) model led by major trading houses, financing large-scale resource and industrial development projects. In the neoliberal era, Japan actively promoted public-private partnership (PPP) frameworks and, through multilateral mechanisms, continued to encourage improvements in Indonesia’s regulatory system.

In contrast to Japan’s more institutionalized approach, China’s engagement in Indonesia has evolved gradually from a relatively de-institutionalized model to a semi-institutionalized one. Using the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway as a case study, Dr. Wijaya illustrated how Chinese firms have structured infrastructure financing in Indonesia. Although Chinese companies encountered considerable challenges when entering the Indonesian market, financing guarantee mechanisms established under the PPP framework ultimately enabled the project to proceed.

Dr. Wijaya described China’s infrastructure investment experience in Indonesia as “challenging yet fortunate.” On the one hand, the changing political environment of the host country continues to challenge the stability of Chinese investment arrangements. On the other hand, Chinese firms have benefited from the institutional foundations established through decades of Japanese engagement, allowing them to build on existing frameworks and, in her words, to “cross the river by feeling for the stones.”

During the discussion session, Professor Zha Daojiong emphasized the importance of industrial and economic factors, cautioning against reducing investment dynamics to a simple geopolitical contest between China and the West. Associate Professor Chen Muyang raised questions about whether Chinese financing has genuinely challenged Japan’s regulatory complex and how Chinese firms have identified commercial opportunities within existing institutional and power structures.

In his concluding remarks, Xie Kankan remarked that the lecture offered a historically grounded and institutionally informed perspective for understanding Sino-Japanese competition in infrastructure financing. The seminar came to a successful close amid vibrant scholarly discussion.

Photos and text by Yin Kaijun

Translated by Gong Zhenning