Indonesian Students Protest Chinese Workers ‘Stealing’ Jobs from Locals

Indonesian students are preparing to protest the arrival of Chinese workers to the eastern island of Sulawesi next week, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.

The students represent a growing number of Indonesians who accuse foreign workers from China of stealing jobs from locals.

The protests next week will join an increasing number of anti-Chinese worker demonstrations in Southeast Sulawesi province. Two such protests were held in June, with the latest occurring on Tuesday when over 100 Chinese workers arrived in the province’s Kendari City. As seen in video footage shared by the SCMP, hundreds of Indonesian student protesters converged at Kendari’s airport attempting to block the Chinese workers from exiting the arrival hall. Police helped the workers successfully exit the airport despite the resistance.

Sulkarnain — the mononymous leader of Kendari’s Islamic Students Association (HMI), which has been organizing the recent protests — told the SCMP that HMI will continue to publicly oppose the arrival of Chinese workers in  Southeast Sulawesi.

“We are planning a third chapter of the demonstrations on July 6 and 7 as we are expecting more Chinese workers to arrive on those days. We are aiming for some 2,000 people [to protest] comprising students and members of the public,” Sulkarnain said.

The Chinese companies PT Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry (VDNI) and PT Obsidian Stainless Steel (PT OSS) contracted the Chinese workers to “install 33 pieces of smelter equipment belonging to PT OSS in Southeast Sulawesi,” the Jakarta Post reported.

Sulkarnain and HMI argue that the Chinese workers being shipped to Indonesia are “not technical experts” and that the work they are hired to perform should be carried out by local workers native to Southeast Sulawesi province. VDNI’s management insists the contracted Chinese workers are in fact “experts” who have acquired Indonesia’s Foreign Workers Use Plan (RPTKA) from the national Manpower Ministry, according to the Jakarta Post.

“We should not be guests in our own country, many local workers want to work, but there are a lot of requirements. There are so many excuses. Just say you don’t want to give us jobs,” Sudirman, a member of Indonesia’s nationalist Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), said during an anti-Chinese worker protest in Southeast Sulawesi on June 23, the Indonesian newspaper Kompas reported.

As of May 27, over 1.79 million people in Indonesia had lost their jobs due to the shut down of “many nonessential businesses … to comply with coronavirus restrictions,” the Jakarta Post noted, citing data from Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry.

“Many local workers have been made redundant or asked to stay home [by employers] during the [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic yet foreign workers are being brought in here,” Sulkarnain told the SCMP this week.

Chinese workers make up the majority of Indonesia’s foreign workforce. As in many countries, the ongoing Chinese coronavirus pandemic has caused an economic recession in Indonesia in recent months. During this recession, a decreasing number of available jobs have been increasingly assigned to Chinese workers over Indonesians by the government, leading to the recent protests and contributing to a growing resentment toward China’s presence in the country.

Last month, security experts and an ex-jihadi terrorist in Indonesia warned that the anti-Chinese sentiment in the Muslim-majority nation has reached a boiling point, with some militant groups active on the islands using social media to call for terrorist attacks to be carried out against Chinese entities.

“Some jihadis have called for the burning and robbing of Chinese shops,” Sofyan Tsauri, a former al-Qaeda terrorist who now supports Indonesia’s counterterrorism efforts, said in early June, according to the SCMP.