When President Joko Widodo shocked Japan by choosing China to build Indonesia’s first high-speed rail line in 2015, he wasn’t surrendering to Beijing’s influence. He was asserting independence.
The Chinese offer to build the Jakarta–Bandung railway—now known as Whoosh—came without government guarantees or direct fiscal burden. It looked like a pragmatic decision by a rising democracy eager to modernize on its own terms.
A decade later, that decision is being reinterpreted as a geopolitical cautionary tale. Cost overruns, debt negotiations and corruption allegations have revived talk of a “Chinese debt trap” in Indonesia. But that narrative misses the point.
The Whoosh is not China’s story—it’s Indonesia’s. The project reflects Indonesia’s ambitions, its bureaucracy and its ongoing struggle to manage complexity – not Beijing’s supposed strategy of entrapment.
This month, Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) opened an investigation into possible mark-ups and irregularities in the project’s budget. Former Coordinating Minister Mahfud MD alleged that construction costs ballooned to $52 million per kilometer—three times higher than the cost of building similar lines in China.
The KPK has yet to confirm any wrongdoing, but the very need for such an investigation underscores where the real problems lie: at home.
The Whoosh’s financial structure was no secret. Of the total US$7.3 billion cost, about 75% was financed through loans from the China Development Bank (CDB) at modest rates—around 2% on principal and 3.4% on overrun costs.
The rest came from equity contributions, led by Indonesia’s state-owned PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), which holds 60% of the operating company, KCIC. This was not a foreign-controlled venture. Indonesia leads the partnership, holds the majority stake and manages daily operations.
If anything, the current challenges—ballooning costs, slow ridership growth and conflicting policy signals—reveal Indonesia’s own institutional bottlenecks. Land acquisition delays, poor inter-ministerial coordination, and shifting political priorities plagued the project from the start.
Construction dragged on for years, and the cost rose by $1.2 billion. Even after its 2023 launch, ticket sales lagged behind expectations, hindered by stations built far from city centers and a patchy last-mile connection system. None of these issues came from Beijing—they were born in Jakarta.
Still, the Whoosh is no operational failure. In its first two years, it carried more than 12 million passengers with 99.9% punctuality, cutting travel time between Jakarta and Bandung from three hours to 40 minutes.
It has already reshaped commuting patterns and encouraged urban development along its corridor. The government hopes to extend the line to Surabaya, connecting Java’s largest cities into a single economic spine.
The problem isn’t that the project failed; it’s that Indonesia underestimated how difficult it would be to manage. As the government now renegotiates the loan structure with Chinese creditors, it’s acting from a position of pragmatism, not desperation.
Investment Minister Rosan Roeslani has confirmed that Indonesia is pursuing a “comprehensive financial reset”—one that could extend repayment terms, adjust interest rates and perhaps convert dollar loans into yuan. China has been open to discussion. Far from the caricature of a predatory lender, Beijing has shown flexibility; what’s missing is Indonesia’s own coordination.
Different officials have given conflicting statements: Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan claimed China agreed to a 60-year repayment term, which others in government quickly walked back. The inconsistency reflects domestic disarray, not external pressure.
Even now, the state’s new sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, is weighing two options to stabilize KCIC—either by injecting more capital into KAI or transferring the rail infrastructure to state ownership. Both solutions are fundamentally Indonesian.
What is at stake, then, is not foreign control but domestic accountability. The Whoosh illustrates both Indonesia’s progress and its fragility. It shows that the country can pursue complex, globally financed infrastructure projects—but also that its bureaucratic machinery struggles to keep up.
The KPK’s probe into cost inflation is necessary and overdue, but the outcome should be reform, not retreat. Jakarta must use this moment to fix how state-owned enterprises manage risk, streamline decision-making and ensure that oversight mechanisms function before—not after—billions are spent.
The temptation to see this through a geopolitical lens is strong. After all, Japan—long Indonesia’s traditional partner—lost the bid to China and Western commentators have since treated the Whoosh as another data point in Beijing’s Belt and Road as debt trap narrative.
But this frame obscures more than it reveals. China financed the steel and supplied the trains, but Indonesia designed the deal, ran the project and now owns the problem—and the opportunity.
What began as a symbol of strategic autonomy has become a test of institutional maturity. The real question is whether Indonesia can learn from the Whoosh: to build faster, negotiate smarter and govern better.
China will continue to play its part as financier and partner, but the project’s long-term success depends on Indonesia’s capacity to manage it transparently and sustainably. The Whoosh’s legacy won’t be written in Beijing’s loan offices; it will be determined in Jakarta’s ministries, boardrooms and courts.
The high-speed train was Indonesia’s choice. Its fate will be, too.
Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) independent research institute.
