The highlights this week: Indonesia struggles with Chinese high-speed rail debt , Myanmar’s bogus election season begins, ex-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appeals at the ICC , and Vietnam fortifies in the South China Sea .

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Indonesia struggles with Chinese high-speed rail debt, Myanmar’s bogus election season begins, ex-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appeals at the ICC, and Vietnam fortifies in the South China Sea.

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Indonesia’s Belt and Road Railway to Nowhere

In Indonesia, a signature project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has fallen on hard times.

The Chinese-built and -funded high-speed railway line is struggling with debt and has become a “time bomb,” the CEO of Indonesia’s state-owned railway told members of parliament in August.

Meanwhile, the national anti-corruption agency is beginning an investigation into the project, and now it looks as if the government will have to bail it out.

Where once observers might have invoked debt-trap diplomacy as an easy explanation for what went wrong, that concept looks increasingly dubious.

Nonetheless, the mundane reality of an ambitious project that failed to live up to its hype illustrates some of the wider problems of Chinese investment in the region.

A March 2024 report on the BRI by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute found that China’s penchant for funding megaprojects vulnerable to problems, delays, and political change had meant that it had yet to deliver on $50 billion in financing.

For a period, it looked as if China had learned its lesson on scaling back investments, promoting projects with the slogan “small but beautiful.” But now BRI investments have surged again—and Indonesia’s stumbling high-speed rail project shows the risks this might bring.

The $7.2 billion project, dubbed Whoosh, kicked off in 2015, when the Indonesian government announced that China would build a high-speed rail link between the capital of Jakarta and the nearby city of Bandung and gradually extend the line to other cities.