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Lamongan, East Java. When the district head of this coastal rice-growing region first toured China five years ago as part of an official delegation, he was stunned. Here was the future: skyscrapers and humming factories and grand highways.

Since then, Masfuk has been trying to move his Indonesian region toward that future: he has mandated that all the schools in Lamongan, population 1.5 million, teach Mandarin Chinese to prepare the youth for doing business with China.

In classrooms, girls in white headscarves and boys in button-down shirts are haltingly reciting from Chinese textbooks and scrawling characters on blackboards. The local government has held Mandarin speech contests for the past two years.

“It’s like watching kung fu movies,” Masfuk said of the wonder of hearing students speaking Mandarin during the contests.

The policy goes against decades of anti-Chinese hostility in the country. But things are changing, and the Chinese government is now sending hundreds of teachers to Indonesia, including one who has taught in Lamongan.

The teaching of the language has gained momentum in recent years. One example: the State University of Surabaya will start offering Mandarin this year.

Many Indonesian students of Mandarin are ethnic Chinese eager to reconnect with their culture. But there are also students of other ethnicities, like those in Lamongan, who want to capitalize on growing economic ties between Indonesia and China.

The two countries did $28.4 billion worth of trade in 2009, and a free trade zone that took effect this year between China and Southeast Asian countries has already led to a huge trade surge, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

“I think Chinese is important for me to learn because I’ve heard of the free trade between China and Indonesia,” said one Lamongan student, Andresya Bargiyyatul, 16. “So I think there must be Chinese businesspeople coming to Indonesia, and I want to communicate with them.”

That attitude is exactly what China has been seeking to cultivate by aggressively supporting the expansion of Mandarin programs in Indonesia and in many other countries.

Last December, the Chinese Ministry of Education opened a Confucius Institute to teach Chinese in Jakarta. The ministry operates 554 Confucius programs — what it calls institutes and classrooms — in 90 countries and regions. The United States has the most, with 68.

The ministry sent 380 teachers to Indonesia between 2004 and 2009, most on three-year contracts. But perhaps because of the recent anti-Chinese history, China prefers to play down any soft-power influence. In Jakarta, the Confucius Institute has done little to advertise itself, and it refused to grant an interview for this report.

Among Indonesian officials, attitudes toward China’s growth are complicated. Indonesia has had a trade deficit with China in recent years, and some officials fear China’s colossal economic might. Then there are optimists like Masfuk.

“I’m looking at trade and investment between Lamongan and China, which has fantastic prospects for the future,” the district head said.

Masfuk began mandating the teaching of Chinese in 2007, two years after his trip to China. The policy has become more entrenched this school year.

Education officials say about half of the hundreds of elementary, junior high and senior high schools in Lamongan now offer at least an extracurricular Chinese class. Many of the 148 junior and senior high schools, both public and private, have mandatory classes. The main limitation is a lack of qualified teachers and Chinese textbooks, school officials say.

“It’s a brave policy,” said Mu’ad, a local education department official. “No other district has this policy. It’s a first for Indonesia.

“We hope in five to 10 years from now there will be workers who will be able to speak Chinese,” he added.

“If Chinese businesspeople or investors come to Lamongan, we hope our students will be able to explain Lamongan to them.”

At Negeri 2, a senior high school with more than 1,000 students, Chinese became mandatory for all three grades this school year. On a recent morning, 30 students dressed in uniforms repeated after a teacher as he recited a phrase in Mandarin: “Every day, Monday through Friday, I attend school.”

The teacher, Achmad Tontowi, has a good command of grammar and written Chinese but struggles with pronunciation. He moved to Lamongan three years ago, when Masfuk first put out a call for Chinese teachers.

Achmad began studying Chinese in 1997 after learning Japanese in college. The teaching of Chinese was still banned then, and Achmad took part in secret classes at a church in Surabaya whose congregation was mostly ethnic Chinese.

“There were about 30 to 40 students,” he said. “Only four were ethnic Javanese; the rest were second- or third-generation Chinese.”

One sign of how far the Indonesian government has come is its willingness to post Chinese teachers across Indonesia.

Officials in Lamongan asked the central government to send native speakers, and in November 2008 Wang Kairui arrived from China. He stayed for eight months before moving on to Aceh Province, and he has a continuing three-year contract with the Chinese Ministry of Education to teach in Indonesia.

“I think this is a really great decree,” Wang, 29, said of Masfuk’s policy.

“But they definitely have some difficulties ahead of them. They just don’t have enough teachers. They don’t have enough textbooks. These are all problems. It really depends on how serious they are.”

 

The New York Times