Trade over conscience?
Soft power, hard choices Indonesia and the Uyghur question
The silence around Xinjiang is no longer quiet. It is heavy. It carries economic calculations, diplomatic hesitations and moral trade-offs that stretch far beyond China’s western frontier and deep into Southeast Asia’s political imagination.
For more than a decade, credible evidence has documented the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, alongside forced labour, cultural erasure and pervasive digital surveillance. What is often overlooked is not only the scale of repression but also how carefully it has been normalised across Muslim-majority societies that once spoke out loudly on Palestine, the Rohingya and Kashmir. Indonesia sits at the heart of this contradiction.
Indonesian articles reveal a striking divergence between public sentiment and the state’s posture. Online engagement around “Bela Uighur” and “Dukung Uighur” surged sharply between 2018 and 2020, peaking at more than 300 recorded discussion points across major Indonesian digital platforms, before declining as pandemic politics and economic anxieties took hold. Public empathy has not vanished; it has been crowded out. State policy, however, never surged at all.
This gap matters. Indonesia is not just another middle power. It is the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, ASEAN’s de facto moral centre and a country whose foreign policy vocabulary still invokes ‘bebas dan aktif’ — free and active. When Jakarta speaks softly on Xinjiang, the echo is heard across Kuala Lumpur, Brunei and even Ankara.
The reasons are not mysterious. China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding US$127 billion in 2023. Chinese investment under the Belt and Road Initiative underpins flagship projects from the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed rail to nickel downstreaming, critical for the global energy transition. Defence ties are also deepening quietly, including joint exercises and technology transfers. In this context, Uyghur suffering becomes diplomatically inconvenient.
Yet convenience is not a strategy. Middle powers shape order not by confrontation, but by coalition-building and norm-setting. Indonesia is uniquely positioned to do exactly that. Silence, by contrast, reinforces a dangerous precedent: that economic leverage can indefinitely override human security, cultural survival and long-term regional stability.
Xinjiang is not only a human rights issue. It is a security and sustainability issue. The region sits at the crossroads of Central and South Asia, anchoring China’s westward energy pipelines and overland trade routes. Persistent repression fuels grievance, radicalisation and transnational instability — dynamics Southeast Asia understands painfully well after decades of counter-terrorism experience. A region pacified by surveillance is not stable; it is brittle.
The economic argument is equally fragile. Forced labour allegations linked to Xinjiang cotton, polysilicon and agricultural products have already triggered sanctions and import bans across the United States, European Union and parts of East Asia. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has documented how global supply chains tied to Xinjiang risk reputational, legal and financial exposure. For Indonesia, whose export ambitions increasingly target ESG-conscious markets, complicity through silence carries real costs.
There is also the cultural dimension, often missing from policy debate. Uyghur language, culture (arts and music), religious practice and historical memory are not abstract ideals; they are living assets of Islamic civilisation. Their erosion impoverishes the ummah as a whole. Indonesian civil society understands this instinctively. The same research shows that Islamic organisations, student movements and independent media consistently framed Uyghur suffering as a moral issue rather than a geopolitical one, even as official narratives avoided the topic.
Indonesia’s foreign policy does not need megaphones. It needs alignment.
A principled, calibrated approach is possible. Jakarta could quietly but firmly support independent UN investigations, as it has done in other contexts. It could work within ASEAN to revive human rights mechanisms long paralysed by consensus politics, reminding the bloc that ‘non-interference’ was never meant to mean 'non-concern'.
It could leverage its credibility in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to reopen multilateral dialogue, shifting the conversation from accusation to accountability.
Australia should stop treating Indonesia as a polite spectator and start recognising it as the pivot. Canberra has the regulatory weight — sanctions, trade controls, and financial leverage. Jakarta has reach, trust and credibility across ASEAN and the wider Muslim world. Separately, that influence drifts. Together, it lands. This is not about issuing statements in parallel. It is about designing standards side by side — aligning supply-chain rules, backing credible investigations, and framing accountability as a defence of human dignity, not a proxy for great-power rivalry.
When Australia’s legal clarity moves through Indonesia’s diplomatic networks, the message stops sounding like a Western lecture and starts feeling like a regional consensus.
Globally, enforcement must meet legitimacy. Northern economies can tighten the screws through customs and finance; southern coalitions can embed those standards in regional institutions and moral narratives that resonate locally. The objective is not punishment for its own sake, but recalibration — shifting the cost of abuse while keeping pathways open for reform.
Middle powers are not condemned to linger at the edges of other nations’ rivalries. With imagination and steady resolve, they can help write the rules instead of merely absorbing them — showing that trade ties do not cancel moral conviction, and that principled partnerships still carry weight in an anxious world.
And this was never about choosing between Beijing and Washington. It is about choosing coherence. It is about deciding whether power in the region will be tempered by norms, whether prosperity can advance without cultural erasure, and whether solidarity — especially within the Muslim world — will mean something consistent rather than convenient.
The real choice is not alignment with a capital, but alignment with values that can endure beyond any single contest of influence.
History will not ask how complex the calculus was. It will ask whether those with influence used it.
The Uyghur story is still being written. It will either become a footnote of managed outrage or a turning point where middle powers rediscover their voice. Indonesia has not lost that voice. It has merely lowered it. The region — and the future — would benefit if it were raised again, carefully, strategically and with unmistakable humanity.
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