Prabowo and the 'Nine Dragons' are pulling in opposite directions

Indonesians have a nickname for the small group of families that sit on top of the private economy: Sembilan Naga, the Nine Dragons. It is an informal label rather than an official list, and it usually points at conglomerates such as Djarum, Salim Group, Lippo Group, Golden Agri-Resources, Barito Pacific and Agung Sedayu, most of them built by Chinese-Indonesian families and spread across banking, tobacco, property, palm oil, mining and consumer goods. The South China Morning Post reports that President Prabowo Subianto and these families are now pulling in opposite directions.

Prabowo has been building what analysts call state capitalism, an economy where the government rather than private owners decides where the big money goes. Three moves point the same way. He has warned publicly about rich Indonesians parking their wealth overseas. He has pulled key export industries under central control. And he has asked wealthy businesspeople to help pay for his flagship state programmes. He rarely names anyone, but the target is not hard to guess. Made Supriatma, a researcher at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, put it plainly: Prabowo may not mention names, but he is clearly taking potshots at the dragons.

The awkward part is that he needs them. The same tycoons he is pressing are the ones holding the cash his programmes require, because state revenue is not covering the bill. So this looks less like an open fight than a long, quiet negotiation. The president pushes, the families hedge, and neither side can afford to lose the other.

Why it matters

If you work for one of these groups, hold their shares, or bank with them, the risk is not a dramatic seizure but a slow chill: firms that feel squeezed delay hiring and put off new factories, so the jobs those plans would have created simply never appear. Watch whether tycoon money actually lands in state projects or quietly moves offshore instead, because money leaving the country is what drags the rupiah down and pushes import prices up. For everyone else, this argument decides who ends up paying for programmes the budget cannot cover.