A Strategic Competition Between China and Japan in the Indo-Pacific: Case From The Whoosh High-Speed Train Projects in Indonesia

印太地区中日战略竞争:以印尼 Whoosh 高速列车项目为案例

Abstract

China’s launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (2013) and Japan’s subsequent Partnership for Quality Infrastructure (2015) have intensified their rivalry over infrastructure exports across Asia. Existing scholarship largely contrasts these initiatives in terms of competition and norm diffusion, but pays less attention to the underlying forces shaping their policy designs. This article proposes a framework in which great-power rivalry and cross-national policy learning jointly guide how infrastructure strategies are formulated. Strategic competition encourages each country to differentiate itself and claim particular market and political spaces, whereas learning from one another’s practices gradually pushes their approaches closer together. We examine these dynamics along three dimensions: how the initiatives are defined, how state-backed support is structured, and how far they rely on multilateral versus bilateral arrangements. Using Indonesian railway projects as a paired case, we show how China, as a relative latecomer, leveraged political and financial innovation to enter a field long dominated by Japan, and how both sides subsequently adjusted their policies after the Jakarta– Bandung high-speed rail tender and the second phase of the Jakarta mass rapid transit project.