Xi Jinping jabs Indonesia’s Joko Widodo with a dose of charm

China’s president also asks his Indonesian counterpart to further collaborate with his Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi Jinping addresses the Boao Forum for Asia on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

China’s leader Xi Jinping has reached out to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo to join him in resisting “vaccine nationalism”, as Beijing lavishes attention on Australia’s northern neighbour.

After denouncing the US for “bossing others around” in a keynote speech at China’s Boao Forum for Asia, Mr Xi called his Indonesian counterpart in a signal of the strategic importance to Beijing of South East Asia’s biggest country.

Mr Xi told Jokowi, as he’s known, that China would continue to help Indonesia build a centre that would produce Chinese-developed vaccines that would allow the two countries to oppose “vaccine nationalism”.

He also asked Jakarta to further collaborate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Mr Xi’s flagship foreign policy doctrine.

“China welcomes Indonesia to seize the opportunity created by China’s fostering of a new development paradigm,” Mr Xi told Jokowi, according to China’s official newsagency Xinhua.

South East Asia has become the most contested theatre of the rising great power rivalry between China and the US.

Beijing and Washington’s tussle for influence has created risks and opportunities as development assistance, visiting senior diplomats and warships become increasingly common in the region of 650 million.

The Morrison government’s most senior foreign affairs official on Wednesday singled out South East Asia as central to Australia’s ongoing and “uncomfortable” strategic competition to “preserve the liberal international order”.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Frances Adamson said Australia’s partners in South East Asia were “navigating the changing dynamics of their own bilateral relationships”.

“They are dealing with a more assertive, ideological and transactional China. And they are looking to build positive connections with the new US administration,” she said in a speech to the Asia Society.

Speaking hours after Mr Xi’s phone call with Indonesia’s president, Ms Adamson said getting COVID-19 vaccines to the region was a priority for the Australian government.

She noted the Morrison government’s funding of $300m for vaccines to nine South East Asian countries through Australia’s foreign aid program, $21m to help establish an ASEAN centre for public health emergencies and $100m as part of a vaccine partnership with its Quad partners the US, India and Japan.

China has also made South East Asia a key focus of its diplomacy, with a particular focus on Indonesia, the biggest economy in the region and its most populous with 270 million people.

“Since the pandemic broke out, China has worked hard to move closer to Indonesia, cooperating on vaccines, keeping trade and investment flowing, and maintaining a high-level of diplomatic engagement, including three face-to-face meetings between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Indonesian counterpart, Retno Marsudi,” said Ben Bland, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute and the author of Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia.

In January, Jokowi became the first leader in the world to be publicly given a Chinese-made vaccine when he was jabbed with a Sinovac dose in a televised ceremony at Jakarta’s presidential palace.

Sinovac is partnering with Indonesia’s state-owned PT Bio Farma and is expected to produce almost half of Indonesia’s vaccine supplies.

Other world leaders who spoke virtually at this year’s Boao Forum – dubbed “China’s Davos” – included South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, Singapore’s President Halimah Yacob and New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

No serving Australian politicians were invited to speak at the event which former prime minister Bob Hawke helped to create.

Australia was represented in person at the conference on Hainan Island, a Chinese island in the country’s south, by Graham Fletcher, Australia’s Ambassador to China.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd and Fortescue Metals iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest – recently appointed a director of the forum’s board — both participated virtually on panels at the conference.

In his Boao keynote address, Mr Xi said global governance “should reflect the evolving political and economic landscape in the world” and called for the safeguarding of the “UN-centred international system”. “Bossing others around or meddling in others’ international affairs will not get one any support,” he said.