Is China shaping Indonesia’s emerging Rebana Metropolitan Area?

Indonesia’s development ambitions are not limited to its new capital city, Nusantara, whose rapid development with Chinese investment we had documented earlier in ThinkChina. On the other side of the archipelago, in West Java province, another massive urban project is quietly reshaping the country’s industrial geography. The Rebana Metropolitan Area, comprising seven regencies and cities in the north-eastern corridor of West Java province, is emerging as a very promising economic hub in Southeast Asia, again with China’s economic engagement.

The name “Rebana” is an acronym drawn from its three anchor nodes: Cirebon, Patimban and Kertajati. Through Presidential Regulation No. 87 of 2021, this economic zone emerged in Indonesia by forming a regional corridor-shaped network made up of Subang regency, Indramayu regency, Majalengka regency, Sumedang regency, Kuningan regency, Cirebon regency and Cirebon city, with an industrial area measuring 43,913 hectares and a population of close to ten million. In terms of scale, this positions Rebana alongside Indonesia’s major urban agglomerations, such as Jabodetabek — spanning Jakarta and parts of West Java with an estimated population of around 30 to 40 million residents — and Gerbangkertosusila in East Java, with a population of around ten million residents.

The rationale behind Rebana is straightforward: Indonesia’s economic activity has long been disproportionately concentrated in the Jabodetabek megapolitan region centred around Jakarta. Rebana offers an alternative, a purpose-built corridor designed to attract investment, generate employment and distribute prosperity more evenly across the archipelago. In the year 2030, it aims to achieve a growth rate of 7.44% and create at least 1.78 million jobs. Is this goal too ambitious relative to Rebana’s perceived and existing advantages factoring in China’s economic participation and contribution?

Rebana’s competitive edge

What gives Rebana its competitive edge is the quality and density of its infrastructure. The corridor is traversed by a network of toll roads, including the Cipali, Cipularang and Cisumdawu, linking its industrial heartland to Jakarta in the west and Central Java in the east. Within this network, several major industrial areas, including Subang Smartpolitan, Patimban Industrial Estate, Sumedang Industrialpolis, and the Kertajati International Industrial Estate Majalengka (KIEM), form the zone’s productive core.

Anchoring the entire system are two world-class gateways. The Patimban port, located in Subang regency and bordering the Patimban Industrial Estate, is among the strategic projects of the Indonesian government, developed in several stages with a target capacity of 7.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) and a vehicle terminal with a cumulative capacity of 600,000 Completely Built Units (CBUs) annually by 2027. 

Alongside this, Kertajati International Airport, located in Majalengka, serves as another key facility that is currently undergoing a strategic transformation. The airport is expected to function as an aircraft Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) facility and Sustainable Aerospace Park, as a result of a master agreement signed in April 2025 between the government and the aviation partners. With 84.2 hectares allocated for the operation of the MRO, this development will be a significant step in making Indonesia’s aerospace industry more self-reliant and improving its standing in the global aviation industry.

The strength of this infrastructure and industrial ecosystem is increasingly reflected in Rebana’s recent investment inflows and economic performance. For 2025, the total value of investments in Rebana amounted to 33.67 trillion rupiah (US$1.8 billion), up 57.67% throughout 2025, with 36 industrial tenants in operation in Q3 2025. Moreover, the region’s economic growth, which registered at 5.53% in Q3 2025, surpassed that of West Java province and the national average. 

China’s economic involvement

Despite ranking fourth among foreign investors, China’s committed investment totals 1.41 trillion rupiah, below Hong Kong (8.97 trillion rupiah), Vietnam (2.96 trillion rupiah) and South Korea (1.46 trillion rupiah), based on indicative average 2025 exchange rates. Its expansion, however, is progressing at a notably rapid pace with a clear strategic intent. Including capital flowing from Hong Kong would raise China’s cumulative contribution significantly higher, making it the leading foreign investor in the corridor. Moreover, as of February 2026, about half of the investments in Subang Smartpolitan, which is the primary industrial township within the zone, were made by Chinese investors across sectors such as manufacturing, textiles, and optical infrastructure. The BYD catalyst: manufacturing at scale

No other investment better illustrates the size and scope of Chinese investments in Rebana than the BYD electric vehicle (EV) factory in Subang Regency. BYD, the world’s biggest producer of EVs by volume with a large factory in Thailand and seeing briskly in Southeast Asia, decided that the best place for building its new automotive facility would be Subang Smartpolitan, an integrated 2,717-hectare industrial township owned by PT Suryacipta Swadaya in preparation for turning it into one of the largest automotive factories in Southeast Asia.

The plan to build the BYD factory was announced in April 2024 on a 108-hectare land area, which was increased to 126 hectares. It involved a total investment of US$1 billion. Mass production will have an estimated annual production capacity of 150,000 units, which will be increased to 300,000 units. In addition, the BYD facility is more than just an assembly facility; BYD intends to build facilities to produce batteries and plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEV). Moreover, once the plant reaches its peak capacity, it is anticipated to hire around 18,000 employees. In such a situation, when the area suffers from unemployment, the promise takes on tangible meaning.

A wave of Chinese manufacturers

One such company is PT Xinfung Industry Indonesia, a subsidiary of Jiangsu Xinfang Technology Group, which is a textiles and fibres manufacturer formed in 1982 in Zhangjiagang county, Suzhou city. The company, which held an inauguration ceremony in Subang in April 2025, laid the groundwork for a production facility during Phase 1, which covers four hectares of land with an initial investment of US$30 million. The factory manufactures high-end fancy yarns for export across Southeast Asia and is scheduled to be fully operational by the beginning of 2026, with phases 2 and 3 set to triple the initial amount of investment. This project was chosen because of Indonesia’s abundance of labour, business stability, and innovation-oriented culture.

In the field of optical infrastructure, there is already interest in building facilities from companies such as PT Yangtze Optics Indonesia, PT Yangtze Optical Fiber Indonesia and ZTT Kabel Indonesia, which is one of China’s largest cable manufacturers. Other Chinese-linked manufacturers present in Subang include PT Jiangsu Jinda Textile Industry, PT H&G Polymeric, PT Zhejiang Binkang (a Shaoxing-based textile printing and dyeing firm) and PT Serendipity International.

PT Kids Play Indonesia, the local entity of Cititoy (a Hong Kong-based toy manufacturer with Chinese ownership origins that was established in 1979), has also committed an investment of US$60 million to develop a ten-hectare facility designed for export to international markets, with its groundbreaking ceremony held in December 2024. At full capacity, the factory is expected to create more than 4,000 jobs, with logistics routed through Patimban Port via the forthcoming Patimban Access Toll Road. From telecoms cable to toys, the breadth of the Chinese industrial cluster taking shape in Subang is notable.

China-Rebana economic engagement

The relationship between China and Rebana goes beyond business transactions; it has now become institutionalised via high-level state visits and inter-provincial cooperation agreements. In January 2026, Rebana Metropolitan Management Agency (Badan Pelaksana Kawasan Rebana/BP Rebana), the governing entity of the zone, made a strategic visit to the city of Hangzhou (one of China’s top innovation hubs), Zhejiang province. The visit included discussions with the China Center for Cooperation on Special Economic Zones in BRICS countries, launched in March 2025 by Chinese President Xi Jinping and a first-of-its-kind centre in the BRICS economic and trade domain. 

The discussion centred on Zhejiang province’s special economic zones strategy, emphasising digital trade, green development and institutional innovation and exploring the possibilities for two-way investment and technology cooperation. This interaction continued some weeks later when a group of Chinese investors, led by Teng Ling Jian from the Hangzhou Qiantang Center for Contemporary Internationalization Studies, visited Sumedang regency and held strategic discussions on investments in various sectors, including industry, tourism, and the creative economy.

These recent developments can also be seen in the context of prior collaboration between West Java province and China’s various provinces. For instance, West Java province and Sichuan province have been collaborating through the Sister Province programme since 2015. In April 2025, Shi Xiaolin, the governor of Sichuan, paid an official courtesy visit to West Java, and the talks were focused mainly on logistics and connectivity, specifically concerning transport links, such as the possibility of opening up flights from Sichuan to the Kertajati International Airport (which is located in Rebana). All of these meetings, involving Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces, as well as the BRICS special economic zone (SEZ) of Hangzhou city, indicate that China is pursuing cooperation with Rebana through multiple channels in a relatively coordinated manner.

Opportunities and a way forward

Rebana’s fundamental proposition rests on both demographic scale and geographic advantages. An urban population of nearly ten million people, comparable to many other significant cities across the globe, serves as a basis for a large domestic workforce and expanding consumer market. Moreover, industrial estates in this region are strategically located between three crucial logistics facilities that serve as gateways to the outside world: a seaport, an airport and a network of Trans-Java highways. Such locations are indispensable in order to be internationally competitive in export-oriented manufacturing.

At the same time, China’s positioning in the context above presents both opportunities and challenges. The transfer of technology from BYD and the deepening of the value chain through Xinfung and ZTT, among other examples, represent actual avenues to industrial upgrading in the region. Indonesia has leverage: the attraction for Chinese businesses in Rebana is not just about its proximity to China but also the massive domestic market of around 287 million people, its relatively low exposure to the elevated US tariffs that have increasingly targeted Chinese exports in recent years, and the advantage of a growing labour force.

Rebana is emerging as a grounded laboratory for Indonesia’s development ambitions, where ports, airports, and industrial zones are deliberately integrated to attract investments in various sectors. Realising this potential will require greater legal certainty, regulatory coherence, and stronger institutional coordination to build the confidence needed for foreign direct investment. If managed well, Rebana could become an important gateway towards regional economic development in West Java Province and, more broadly, across Indonesia. If Chinese investment can be leveraged to help achieve this goal, it will add another bright spot to Indonesia-China cooperation under the BRI featuring the Jakarta-Bandung High-speed Train and the Nusantara project.

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