LAMONGAN, Indonesia — When the regent of this coastal rice-growing region on the island of Java first toured China as part of an official delegation, his eyes went wide. Here was the future, he thought: skyscrapers and humming factories and grand highways.

Now, the regent, Masfuk, has begun 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 here, girls in white head scarves 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 the past two years.

“It’s like watching kung-fu movies,” Mr. Masfuk said of the wonder of hearing students speaking Mandarin during the contests. Like many Indonesians, he uses just one name.
The policy goes against decades of anti-Chinese hostility in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population. But things are changing, and the Chinese government is now sending hundreds of teachers to Indonesia, including one who has taught in Lamongan.
As China’s economic power grows, the study of Mandarin is surging around the world. Its rise in Indonesia may be one of the most telling examples of how China’s influence is overflowing even the steepest of barriers.

Leaders here accused China of supporting a failed Communist coup in 1965, and President Suharto banned the teaching of Chinese and all expressions of Chinese culture during his authoritarian rule, from 1967 to 1998. One Javanese man who now teaches Chinese in Lamongan had to study the language secretly in a church group in 1997.