Expert: China Identifies Indonesia as Vital Partners amid ASEAN Countries

China’s direct investment in Indonesia reached $2.12 billion in 2012, more than double the figure in 2010. Trade between the two has developed fast since they resumed diplomatic relations in 1990, said Wu Chongbo, a professor specializing in Southeast Asian studies at Fujian-based Xiamen University. Statistics show that mutual trade between China and Indonesia hit $66.2 billion in 2012, a 9.4 percent increase over the previous year.

Indonesia is enticing Chinese investment over the past few years, in addition to expand trading. Wu said China Development Bank and The Export-Import Bank of China would follow their footsteps to provide “the capital Indonesia’s infrastructure construction requires.”
Wu also expects that the government will continue investing heavily in the sector in the following five years. “The extensive investment has not only boosted Indonesia’s economic development but also created some 30,000 jobs for locals,” he added.

Chinese tourists are helping to boost Indonesia’s tourism industry, as they are the third-largest contributor to the country’s GDP. The country has seen a growing inflow of Chinese tourists in the past years. Statistics show that 618,000 Chinese visited Indonesia in 2012, a 20.64 percent rise from the previous year.

Local tourism authorities have decided to entice one million Chinese tourists in 2014 by adopting such measures as facilitating currency exchange, bettering hotel reservations and increasing the number of flights between the two countries, Wu said. In 2008, central banks of the two countries signed a mutual currency swap agreement that has a value of 100 billion yuan.