Once banned, Mandarin learning in Indonesia on the rise amid improving ties with China

Sandy Riyadi — originally from Indonesia’s West Kalimantan provincial capital of Pontianak — “really hated” Mandarin because he found it difficult. He dreaded learning it for two hours weekly at local vocational and junior high schools, often scoring less than the minimum passing criteria.

But in 2018, Sandy began to take his Chinese-language studies more seriously, and enrolled at a language school in the city for his bachelor’s degree after realizing more job prospects required Chinese proficiency. Once earning the degree in 2022, he moved to Beijing late last year and studied how to teach the language to non-Chinese foreign speakers for his master’s degree.

The 22-year-old — who speaks the Chinese languages of Teochew and Hakka at home — dreamed of opening a Mandarin learning center and teaching more Indonesian students in Pontianak while hoping to work for a Chinese company back home.

“Mandarin nowadays is one of the most important [languages] to master, so [I] don’t want to be left behind,” he told The China Project.

While most of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority — more than 2.8 million people per the country’s 2010 census — speak Indonesian daily, some families speak Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew. Mandarin is not a common home language.

China-Indonesia ties

Indonesia is now Southeast Asia’s largest economy. As it has engaged more with China to ramp up its exports and inbound investments, Mandarin proficiency has become a more desired skill among the Indonesian workforce.

There is no official data on the number of Mandarin learners in Indonesia, but many study the language at Indonesian schools, language centers, and online platforms. Indonesians also live in China or Taiwan for language programs — either self-funded or on scholarships.

Xiè Kǎnkǎn 谢侃侃, an assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies at Peking University, said: “Mandarin education definitely brought some positive impact to the China-Indonesia ties,” as “the rise of China brings new economic opportunities” for the world’s fourth most populous country of more than 275 million.

Indonesia’s Investment Ministry reported 5,665 projects from mainland China and Hong Kong throughout the country in the first half of 2023. The ministry added mainland China was the nation’s second-largest foreign investor at $3.8 billion, whereas Hong Kong came in third at $3.5 billion. Neighboring Singapore topped the list at $7.7 billion.

Last year, according to the Ministry, mainland China was the second-largest investor throughout 2022 with $8.2 billion, and Hong Kong was third at $5.5 billion. (Singapore was the biggest investor, at $13.3 billion.)

Despite investments from China, there is still resentment felt by some Indonesians toward the People’s Republic. According to the Indonesia National Survey Project 2022 published by ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, 34.1% of respondents perceived China’s rise negatively, while only 27.1% saw it positively. The survey five years ago showed an opposite finding.

“Possibly, respondents have become more guarded in their assessment of the impact of China’s rise, and prefer to base their judgement on further outcomes of China’s engagement with Indonesia,” according to the survey.

“Although there are reservations about the impact of China’s rise, only a small proportion of respondents consider the relationship between China and Indonesia to be bad (11.5%).”

Reasons for studying the language

Economic opportunities, including higher salaries and more Chinese business partners, attract many Indonesians to study the language.

Jakarta resident Edo Himura — who owns the Easy Mandarin language center in the Kelapa Gading district of the Indonesian capital — said many of his students wanted to focus on conversation skills because of work or business dealings. They were not as concerned about reading and writing.

“That’s why 60% of our teaching is more focused on conversation [classes],” he told The China Project, adding Easy Mandarin does not emphasize textbook materials and memorizing Chinese characters. His language center teaches students listening, reading, and writing skills.

The 35-year-old Chinese Indonesian — who went to Shanghai in 2009 to study the language for a year and a half — now has around 170 adult and child students, with about 12 teachers. Easy Mandarin sets prices from 100,000 to 200,000 rupiah ($6.60 to $13.20) for each group or private session for every person.

When in Shanghai, Edo found many Indonesians learning Mandarin in China were above 30 years of age, but after he started the company in 2013, he said that those registering for his classes tend to be younger, from 14 to 25.

Aside from work-related purposes, younger Mandarin learners often cite Chinese pop culture as the primary motivation.

Jannice Josephine Lie chose to learn Mandarin after consuming Chinese entertainment. Originally from Medan in Indonesia’s North Sumatra Province, the 18-year-old has studied the language at local schools and learning centers since she was five. She watches wǔxiá 武侠 (martial arts) dramas, and she hopes not to rely on English subtitles. But she also has career goals in mind, and plans to head to Beijing to study international business for her bachelor’s degree in late August.

The politics of Chinese-language study

It was not always this way. The Cold War spilled into newly independent Indonesia in the mid-1960s. The government blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for staging a coup in 1965.

At the same time, the Beijing-Taipei rivalry pushed some local ethnic Chinese populations — rooted in the archipelago for centuries — to side with either of the governments.

Zhōu Táomò 周陶沫, an associate professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said Indonesia’s Mandarin education landscape in the 1950s influenced some students to “orient toward the People’s Republic of China politically” because some teaching materials used in the pro-Beijing classrooms were from the country, and had leftist tendencies. Zhou said.

Most victims of the mass killings were members or sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party. They were targeted due to ideological reasons, not because of their ethnicity. But overall, the Chinese in Indonesia, regardless of their political affiliation, experienced a period of insecurity in 1965–66. Many ethnic Chinese were harassed, imprisoned, or deprived of their property and expelled from Indonesia.

Meanwhile, pro-Taipei Chinese-medium schools were also present in Indonesia. She said those institutions incorporated Sun Yat-sen’s (孫中山 Sūn Zhōngshān) Three Principles of the People and anti-communist messages in their teaching.

“The Indonesian government, of course, was alarmed by this kind of Chinese nationalism promoted in the schools,” Zhou told The China Project.

“The Chinese-language schools were seen as a hotbed for instigation or interference from China.”

Zhou, the author of the 2019 book Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War, said the Indonesian government banned pro-Taipei schools first “because Taiwan supported a regional rebellion against Sukarno,” referring to the Permesta rebel movement in the late 1950s against the country’s founding father.

“At the time, Sukarno was very left-oriented, and the United States was very much alarmed by that,” she said, adding Washington used its ally Taiwan “as a transit station” to back the rebellion.

“Chinese-language schools were hard hit, but still kind of survived until 1965. After 1965, it was basically a total ban.”

Following the coup attempt in 1965, known as G30S, then major general Suharto took over the presidency and ruled Indonesia for over three decades until he stepped down in 1998 after mass demonstrations.

Under Sukarno, Indonesia aligned with China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Suharto later became close with the United States as the country sided with the West, suspending relations with Beijing until 1990.

The strongman banned Chinese-medium schools, public Chinese character displays, and private Chinese-language newspapers, among other regulations, as those were perceived to be associated with China and communism.

But there was “a revival of Mandarin education in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, especially under Gus Dur,” Xie of Peking University said, the latter referring to Indonesia’s late fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid, who ruled the country from 1999 to 2001.

After a January 2000 presidential decree, restrictions were lifted and permits were no longer required to hold Chinese religious and customs activities. Mandarin classes have since blossomed in Indonesia; the first Confucius Institute (locally known as Pusat Bahasa Mandarin or Mandarin Language Center) was established in the country in September 2007.

Jakarta’s Chinatown. Photo for The China Project by David Andreas.

It’s not just ethnic Chinese Indonesians

Mandarin’s popularity in Indonesia goes beyond geographic locations and ethnicities. Xie said those studying the language are “not limited to Chinese Indonesians only.”

“We see increasingly more students with non-Chinese heritage learning the language, studying abroad in China, and working for Chinese companies in Indonesia,” he told The China Project.

Dewi Sulistyowati, who is ethnic Javanese and was born in Boyolali Regency in Indonesia’s Central Java Province, first studied Mandarin in 2005 as an undergraduate student at a public university.

“At that time, I thought Mandarin’s future prospects would boom by the time I graduated,” she said. “If we can speak Mandarin, even if we haven’t graduated, usually tutoring places already want to [hire us].”

Dewi, who since 2018 heads the Mandarin-language education program at Universitas Kristen Indonesia (UKI) — a private Jakarta university — said the job market was “still very wide open,” given the many projects from China.

“My students here turn down jobs because so many offers come in,” she said, referring to full-time teaching and translation positions.

Despite the trend, Xie of Peking University said that Mandarin-language education in Indonesia is “still lagging behind compared with neighboring countries, especially Malaysia and Singapore, where Mandarin education is more systematic, well-organized, and better funded.”

Dewi — who has taught at UKI for over a decade — explained that “there were no standards [set] by the government” for the language, as universities were freer to design the curriculum.

However, there were some requirements that she and other lecturers — members of the same Mandarin education association — agreed on.

“For example, the minimum standard for graduates is HSK 4 (a standardized test for Chinese-language ability — HSK 9 is the most advanced level). So throughout Indonesia, the minimum standard for undergraduates is HSK 4,” Dewi told The China Project, adding those standards were acceptable given the students started from zero.

“But how [lecturers] set the curriculum, what courses [they] want to create, those all depend on the universities.”

Yet the future of Mandarin study in Indonesia remains bright — if not brighter — as the ties continue to grow between Jakarta and Beijing. Indonesian President Joko Widodo in late July met with Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 in Chengdu, which resulted in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) — among other agreements — on Mandarin-language education cooperation signed by the two governments.

Yudil Chatim, an education and culture attaché at Indonesia’s embassy in Beijing, said in a press release that the agreement was first signed in 2013 before being temporarily renewed in 2018 and its extension plan in 2020 affected because of the pandemic.

The MoU included a partnership program that combined Mandarin and vocational education amid increasing investments from Chinese companies in Indonesia, emphasizing the need to strengthen the language education at Indonesia’s educational institutions.

Besides that, according to the press release, an arrangement is offered to Indonesian undergraduate students to spend two years in Indonesia and two more years in China. The program aims to allow Indonesian students to study Mandarin in Indonesia for the first two years before continuing their studies in China. Diploma students may also spend a year studying in Indonesia, another year learning in China, and their final year in the industry.

With around 4,000 universities — including about 2,200 vocational universities — and more than 14,400 vocational schools across Indonesia, schools and students are counting on economic opportunities as China’s businesses continue to expand in the republic.