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The Compass: Chinese Dreams: Chinese Dreams: Indonesia

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Episode 2: Indonesia

01/01/2020 GMT

Chinese Dreams: Indonesia

Chinese Dreams

BBC World Service - The Compass, Chinese Dreams, Chinese Dreams: Indonesia

Will China's rise help Chinese-Indonesians or encourage more discrimination and envy?

The ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia have long suffered discrimination and economic envy.  Rebecca Henschke asks if the rise of China will help them, or make matters worse.

Will the rise of China help or damage Chinese-Indonesians? The ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia have long suffered discrimination – forbidden from taking jobs in government and the military and targeted during violent riots in 1998. In the city of Yogyakarta they are still not allowed to own land. But some Chinese-Indonesians have benefited economically from the rise of China, as middlemen between the two economies. Today, 8 of the 10 richest Indonesians are thought to be ethnically Chinese. And now more and more Indonesians are studying in China or learning Mandarin. BBC Asia Editor Rebecca Henschke asks if the rise of China and the growing prominence of some ethnic Chinese will create further resentment - or if there can be a happier outcome?

Produced by Arlene Gregorius for the BBC World Service. 

Editor: Hugh Levinson.

Chinese Dreams is a five-part series examining how China’s rise is affecting nations around the globe. 

(Image: Favian – a young Chinese businessman, standing in the warehouse of his family’s business in the city of Balikpapan in Indonesia. Credit: Yudistira Tribudiman/BBC)

The Compass: Chinese Dreams

How countries across the world are responding to the rise of China.

In nation after nation, one issue has risen up the political agenda – often becoming a national obsession. The rise of China, and the ensuring benefits and harms of its influence, has become a contentious issue across every continent. This series looks at how Chinese power – whether economic, political or ideological - is affecting individual countries across the globe. As it has grown richer, China has inevitably worked to protect its economic and political interests, through creating alliances with governments and spreading its own values.
 
Many nations, especially poorer ones, have benefited from massive investment in roads, rail, ports and factories. They have also ridden a boom in sales of raw materials and agricultural products to the fast expanding Chinese market. China has provided a model of economic development which has been copied and adapted by other emerging economics, especially in Asia. Yet there has often been resentment: at material factors like floods of cheap Chinese imports, of exploitative and opaque deals, shoddy construction and the arrival of Chinese migrant workers. And there are deeper concerns: about undue influence on – even the subversion of - politicians and policy makers: the spreading of a Chinese-patterned ideology and a downplaying of human rights: and efforts to paint a rosy picture of China and to suppress criticism. In these five episodes, The Compass takes a clear-eyed view of how China’s money and power are influencing debate within five very different nations.

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