Why Indonesian President Prabowo is drawn to Xi Jinping’s China

On the night of 2 September 2025, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto made a swift and closely watched trip to Beijing to attend China’s massive military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in World War II. His appearance, reportedly at the personal invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, was widely interpreted as a significant diplomatic gesture, even though Prabowo remained in the Chinese capital for less than a day.

Early reports suggested Prabowo would skip the event due to domestic turbulence in Indonesia, where protests over corruption, legislator allowances, police abuses and widening inequality filled the streets for nearly a week. But once the situation was deemed sufficiently stable, and amid firm encouragement from Beijing, Prabowo proceeded with the visit. 

The optics were unmistakable. At the parade, he stood in the front row beside Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It was an unmistakable signal of Indonesia’s rising relevance within the shifting architecture of global power, between a China increasingly confident in its multipolar ambitions and a Russia still entrenched in geopolitical confrontation with the West.

International observers immediately read Prabowo’s presence as an extraordinary honour extended by Beijing. But at home, reactions were sharply mixed. For critics, the timing was deeply problematic. Attending a foreign military parade while major protests simmered at home struck many Indonesians as misplaced priority.

Others framed his appearance as a sign of Jakarta’s growing susceptibility to China’s diplomatic pull, especially at a moment when Indonesia needed to project independence. Japanese media, notably, refrained from placing Prabowo in the perceived “anti-Western bloc” of Xi, Putin and Kim Jong Un, suggesting the picture was far more nuanced than initial commentary implied.

Yet beyond the optics and controversy lay a deeper reality. Prabowo’s acceptance of Xi’s invitation reflected more than diplomatic politeness. It revealed a resonance, an ideological and strategic affinity, between the governing styles of Prabowo and Xi. Both leaders draw heavily on their nations’ historical narratives, cultural lineages and traditional values to craft a distinct brand of leadership that seeks legitimacy beyond the usual metrics of democracy or development. 

While many leaders borrow selectively from history or culture, Prabowo and Xi stand out because both attempt a deliberate strategic synthesis, blending revolutionary or post-authoritarian legacies with deep civilisational narratives to construct a personalised model of authority. This pairing is distinctive not merely for ideological overlap, but because each leader seeks to ground political centralisation in culturally resonant moral vocabularies (Confucian-Mencian ethics for Xi, and Indonesia’s communitarian traditions for Prabowo), creating a parallel but locally rooted architecture of legitimacy.

Prabowo has long portrayed himself as the inheritor of Indonesia’s presidential lineage, from Sukarno’s charisma to Suharto’s order, Habibie’s technocratic spirit, Gus Dur’s pluralism, Megawati’s nationalism, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s diplomacy, and Jokowi’s pragmatism. He presents himself as a synthesis of these predecessors, claiming to distill their virtues into a strategic posture uniquely suited for Indonesia’s current juncture.

This narrative is fortified by references to traditional values such as gotong royong (mutual cooperation), tepo seliro (empathetic restraint), mendem jero (internalised self-restraint), and asas kekeluargaan (familial solidarity), framing his leadership as inherently rooted in Indonesian communitarian philosophy rather than any particular ideological doctrine.

Xi has built a similar intellectual project, one grounded in an intricate fusion of China’s revolutionary heritage and classical philosophical canon. As Zhang Xiaotong explains in China’s Modern Economic Statecraft: A Wealth-Power Dialectic (2024), Xi blends Maoist state-led development and ideological discipline with Deng Xiaoping’s economic pragmatism. To these, he adds Confucian and Mencian ideas of moral order, social harmony and benevolent governance.

From Mao Zedong, Xi inherited the supremacy of collective interests and the centrality of the Chinese Communist Party. From Deng, he embraced the practical ethos encapsulated in Deng’s famous metaphor of the cat catching mice, prioritising results over ideology. And from China’s classical tradition, he adopted a moral vocabulary that frames development as both a political necessity and a pathway to national rejuvenation.

This ideological fusion underpins Xi’s major strategic programmes, the Belt and Road Initiative, Made in China 2025, the dual circulation strategy, the common prosperity goal and the sweeping anti-corruption campaign that began in 2013. Under his leadership, the slogan of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has taken on new meaning, becoming what Zhang describes as “developmentalism with Chinese characteristics” where economic growth is inseparable from national power and social stability.

Prabowo’s programme shows unmistakable parallels. His efficiency drive, aimed at reducing bureaucratic waste, echoes Xi’s anti-corruption push — not in its institutional methods, but in its underlying logic that state capacity requires moral and administrative discipline. Prabowo also advocates consolidating national resources under the government’s stewardship, arguing that Indonesia’s wealth must serve national development rather than private gain. Like Xi, he rebukes oligarchic interests and frames economic rejuvenation as both a matter of justice and a foundation for geopolitical leverage.

Where Xi draws on Confucian moralism, Prabowo anchors his rhetoric in gotong royong and familialism. Both leaders appeal to deeply embedded cultural values to justify strategic centralisation. Yet their traditions diverge, and with them, the institutional pathways available to each leader.

Here, institutional legacies become decisive. While both Xi and Prabowo borrow legitimacy from tradition, China and Indonesia are shaped by “institutional genes” that differ fundamentally in strength, consistency and historical continuity.

Chenggang Xu, in Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism (2025), argues that China’s governance system emerges from the fusion of imperial centralism and Leninist authoritarianism. This hybrid has produced highly cohesive institutions capable of controlling, disciplining and channelling economic change without surrendering political authority. China’s modern bureaucracy, descended from millennia of dynastic rule, has long been structured to integrate society into the state rather than mediate between independent power centres. Liberal democracy was never a natural destination for such a system.

Indonesia’s institutional heritage, by contrast, is fragmented. Its political order descends from disparate precolonial kingdoms later bound together by Dutch colonial rule and influenced by Javanese centralism, Weberian bureaucracy, and Japanese militarism. This complex mixture produced Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and Suharto’s New Order, forms of strongman governance resting on uneven institutional foundations.

Benedict Anderson famously described Indonesian power as shaped by Javanese political culture layered with Weberian rationalism and Japanese military ethos. The result is a state that oscillates between democratic aspiration and centralist impulse. Unlike China, Indonesia’s constitution embeds liberal democratic principles, creating an ongoing tension between its legal ideals and its institutional DNA.

This divergence matters. Xi’s strategic synthesis aligns neatly with China’s institutional genes; Prabowo’s does not enjoy the same structural coherence. China possesses the centralisation, bureaucratic stability and civilisational continuity required for cohesive long-term strategy. Indonesia — though capable of bursts of strong leadership — operates within a more plural, fragmented and often contested political landscape.

Thus, while Prabowo seeks to emulate a form of strategic leadership that has propelled China onto the global stage, the institutional constraints he faces are far more complex. Indonesia’s political system cannot easily sustain the degree of centralisation that Xi commands. Nor can it absorb ambitious state-led economic strategies without navigating constitutional limits, decentralised governance and the competing interests of political coalitions.

In essence, Xi has already charted a successful path towards elevating China’s power without adopting Western democratic norms, much like Japan rose to prominence vis-a-vis the US half a century ago, but in a distinctly Chinese manner. Prabowo appears eager to demonstrate that Indonesia can pursue a similar trajectory: a strong state, a disciplined developmental agenda and a leadership style rooted in cultural identity.

Whether Indonesia’s institutional genes will permit this ambition to fully materialise remains an open question. But Prabowo’s Beijing visit, and the symbolism surrounding it, signals his desire to place Indonesia more firmly within the emerging multipolar order, even as the contours of Indonesia’s long-term path are still being written.

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