Mandarin lessons sponsored by the Chinese government are held every Tuesday and Thursday inside Southeast Asia’s largest mosque, Masjid Istiqlal, in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. The teachers and course materials for the Mandarin lessons are provided free of charge by the Confucius Institute at Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia, a university that seeks to “apply universal Islamic values in character building” as part of its mission. According to the Confucius Institute’s website, Indonesia has nine Confucius Institutes across the country.
Masjid Istiqlal has a capacity of 120,000 people, and was inaugurated in 1978 as Indonesia’s national mosque. 25 registered students—20 of whom work at the mosque—take the Chinese classes. One of them is the mosque’s public relations and protocol subsection chief, Saparwadi (who like many Indonesians goes by one name). He took his first Mandarin class when the program launched in February this year. Saparwadi says he is “very happy” with the initiative, in part because he believes better Mandarin proficiency among Masjid Istiqlal’s staffers will mean better service for the mosque’s international visitors. Saparwadi said the mosque, which is among Jakarta’s most popular tourist sites, records around 7,000 foreign tourists every month. The biggest group is from China at about 600 to 700, followed by visitors from Japan and South Korea.
“Chinese tourists sometimes struggle to speak in English, let alone Indonesian. It is difficult for us to communicate. . . If they do not bring guides, what do we do? We use sign language,” he says. But the mosque had no funding for Mandarin lessons until the Chinese embassy “suddenly initiated” the program after a flurry of meetings between Islamic figures in Indonesia and Lu Kang, China’s ambassador from 2022 to May 2024.
In some ways, this is a remarkable turnaround: After a coup attempt in 1965, the military leader Suharto took over the Indonesian presidency and, fearful of communist influence, broke off relations with China and banned Chinese-medium schools, public displays of Chinese characters, and private Chinese-language newspapers.
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Indonesia is a secular democracy that officially recognizes six religions—Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—but Islam is by far the biggest: Around 87 percent of the country’s over 280 million people identify as Muslim. Islam arrived in Indonesia as early as the 13th Century, following traders from India, Persia, and the Middle East. Many scholars also credit the Ming Dynasty eunuch and naval admiral Zheng He as an important figure in spreading Islam throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
In the 20th Century, Indonesia became the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. So as Beijing ramps up its engagement with the Global South and with the Muslim world, it is unsurprising that it has been reaching out to various Muslim organizations and strengthening its people-to-people exchanges with the Muslim community in Indonesia.
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the first Confucius Institute in Indonesia was established at an Islamic university,” says Johanes Herlijanto, co-founder and chairman of the Indonesian Sinology Forum. “China’s diplomatic efforts toward the Muslim community in Indonesia are aimed at a holistic improvement in China’s image.”
In March, then-ambassador Lu Kang met with Yahya Cholil Staquf, the general chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, an Islamic organization with more than tens of millions of members. This followed a 2022 event with Nahdlatul Ulama’s Ansor Youth Movement.
In April this year, the Chinese embassy jointly held a Ramadan care-package donation event and iftar (the evening meal eaten during Ramadan to break the fast) with Muhammadiyah, another Islamic organization with tens of millions of members. At the event with Muhammadiyah, the Embassy’s Interim Chargé d’Affaires Zhou Kan “extended Ramadan greetings to Indonesian Muslims and briefly [spoke about] the visit of Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto to China,” noting that Prabowo’s choice to visit China in April as his first trip after being elected “reflects the high level of China-Indonesia relations.” Prabowo, the country’s current defense minister, is set to be sworn in this October after winning the election held in February.
Members of Muhammadiyah also visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on a recent junket; the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta uploaded a brief video about the trip to Instagram in June.
In September last year, Lu met with the mosque’s Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar and its management board members. Nasaruddin had visited China a month earlier, where he “held in-depth discussions on exchanges and cooperation between the two countries in the fields of religion, culture, education, etc.”
The visit included a tour of Xinjiang, which points to one reason that China’s government is keen on developing relations with Muslim organizations: Indonesia is an outlier amongst Muslim countries for the demonstrations that its civil society organizations have held to protest China’s treatment of Uyghurs. Hundreds of Indonesians, including Muslims, protested in front of China’s embassy in Jakarta and its Medan consulate general in the country’s North Sumatra province in support of the Uyghur people in August 2023. Muslim students from universities in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area demonstrated in solidarity with the Uyghurs in July 2023. In December 2018, hundreds of people demonstrated in front of the embassy, and protesters also did so a year later. In Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost and only province enforcing Sharia or Islamic law, hundreds of people also did the same in December 2018.
According to Australian think tank Lowy Institute’s 2021 Indonesia poll, 44 percent of people surveyed said “protecting Uyghur communities in China” was a “fairly important” priority for Indonesia. 22 percent responded that it was a “very important” priority for the country.
However, the Indonesian government has not always reflected these concerns. Jakarta voted against a motion to discuss Xinjiang at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2022. In explaining the vote, Indonesia’s representative to the UN in Geneva did not endorse China’s Xinjiang policies, but said the motion would “not yield meaningful progress” because it “does not enjoy the consent and support of the concerned country.”
On the other hand, Jakarta has not followed the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League, and several governments of Muslim-majority countries in more explicitly endorsing Beijing’s repressive management of Xinjiang. In 2019, the OIC released resolutions from a meeting of its member states’ foreign ministers which “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens.” In 2023, more than 30 officials from 16 member countries of the Arab League were invited by China’s Foreign Ministry on a junket to Xinjiang. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, after the trip, “Members of the delegation said that . . . Muslims exercise their ethnic and religious rights freely in accordance with the law,” and that the “Xinjiang they saw was completely different from what some Western media portray, and the so-called ‘genocide’ and ‘religious persecution’ are complete lies.”
Mandarin classes at Masjid Istiqlal and similar initiatives might result in very similar statements from Indonesian religious and political figures. Saparwadi, the student at the Istiqlal mosque, said, “It is not true that the Chinese government is especially intolerant of Islam. That is just provocation or news from outside [parties] that have never seen China. That is why the Istiqlal people . . . were invited to China to see how Muslims practice their religion. It turns out they are given freedom there.”
“China also seeks to dampen the [negative] sentiment related to the Uyghurs, both through diplomatic efforts to Muslim circles and other Indonesian audiences,” Johanes of the Indonesian Sinology Forum said. “One of the PRC’s strategies to suppress Uyghur-related issues is to invite Indonesian people to visit and show them the Uyghur situation. . . The P.R.C. then argues that the inhumane treatment of Uyghurs is actually just a fabrication and propaganda of the Western media,” he said.
“Interestingly, these arguments . . . are often echoed by members of certain academic circles in Indonesia [including] some of those who have studied in China. This can certainly be considered as one of the indications of the success of the PRC’s educational diplomacy,” he added.
But Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies, an Indonesian think tank, says, “China’s Muslim diplomacy wins in some segments of the society. . . But among the public, I cannot say it is completely successful.”
That might not matter. The war in Gaza may have completely changed the optics: Beijing has joined Muslim nations in condemning Israel’s military operations, without saying a word of criticism about the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, most explicitly in a “Joint Statement of China and Arab States on the Question of Palestine” issued in May 2024. Such explicit alignment with Muslim nations “will not change the perception or sentiment of many Indonesians toward the country,” says Nur Rachmat Yuliantoro, head of the Department of International Relations at Universitas Gadjah Mada, one of Indonesia’s leading public universities. “However, when it is tied to the issue of independence from colonialism, they can clearly put Beijing on the opposite side of Washington,” he adds.