Asymmetric Interdependence as Bargaining Leverage: Indonesia’s Economic Hedging in and Beyond the Belt and Road Initiative 2013–2024

ABSTRACT: This article explains why Indonesia’s growing economic exposure to China has generated different bargaining outcomes across major infrastructure and critical-mineral projects. Rather than treating asymmetric interdependence as either a deterministic source of Chinese coercion or evidence of unconstrained host-state agency, the article asks when structural dependence can be converted into bargaining leverage. It develops a framework that combines Keohane and Nye’s distinction between sensitivity and vulnerability with the hedging literature and recent work on geoeconomics and politicised interdependence. The framework separates potential bargaining resources—credible exit options, alternative partners, and control over strategically scarce assets—from the domestic institutional capacity required to convert those resources into policy outcomes. Empirically, the study uses a qualitative structured, focused comparison and documentary process tracing of three cases: the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed railway, the Morowali nickel industrial ecosystem, and the Kayan Cascade hydropower project. The comparison finds that Indonesia’s leverage is weakest after sunk costs and financing concentration narrow exit options, as in the railway case; stronger but distributionally uneven where regulatory control over a critical resource creates counter-leverage, as in nickel downstreaming; and potentially preservable when commitment remains incomplete and partners can be substituted, as in Kayan. The article contributes to middle-power and hedging scholarship by showing that asymmetry is mediated by asset specificity, project sequencing, and institutional conversion capacity rather than by aggregate power differentials alone.

Keywords: Indonesia, China, asymmetric interdependence, economic hedging, Belt and Road Initiative, economic statecraft, critical minerals, middle power.