Published On 31 Aug 2025
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has cancelled a trip to China, as deadly antigovernment protests spread outside the capital, and social media platform TikTok suspended its live feature, citing concerns over the “increasing violence” in the Southeast Asian country.
The announcement by Prabowo’s spokesman came on Saturday as Indonesian authorities said that at least three people were killed in an arson attack on a parliament building in Makassar, the capital of the South Sulawesi province, on the previous day.
The protests mark the first major test for Prabowo’s nearly year-old government. They began in Jakarta on Monday over lawmakers’ pay and worsened after a police vehicle hit and killed a motorcycle rider.
“The president wants to continue monitoring [the situation in Indonesia] directly… and seek the best solutions,” presidential spokesperson Prasetyo Hadi said in a video statement.
“Therefore, the president apologises to the Chinese government that he could not attend the invitation.”
Prabowo had been due to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China’s Tianjin as well as a “Victory Day” parade on September 3 to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
The protests in Indonesia were sparked by reports that all 580 lawmakers receive a monthly housing allowance of 50 million rupiah ($3,075) in addition to their salaries.
Critics argue that the new allowance is not only excessive but also insensitive at a time when most people are grappling with soaring living costs and taxes, as well as rising unemployment.
The protests grew wider and more violent following the death of 21-year-old ride-hailing driver Affan Kurniawan in Jakarta on Thursday. A video on social media, apparently showing his death, shocked the nation and spurred an outcry against the country’s security forces.
Prabowo, who had been an army general under former leader Muhammad Soeharto, has urged calm and offered condolences for the driver’s death.
But he has also called on the military and police chiefs to act decisively to restore order.
Earlier on Saturday, protesters caused fires at regional parliament buildings in three provinces – West Nusa Tenggara, Pekalongan city in Central Java and Cirebon city in West Java – local media reported.
Detik.com said the protesters had looted parliamentary office equipment in Cirebon, and that police had fired tear gas to disperse protesters in Pekalongan and West Nusa Tenggara.
More protests planned
Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington, reporting from Jakarta, said that “thousands of protesters remain on the streets” in the nation’s capital amid widespread anger about a “housing allowance for politicians, which is 10 times the minimum wage” in the city.
“The government is calling for calm, but the protests are expanding, with more grievances in more cities and more demonstrations planned for the coming days,” Washington said.
Local media also reported that a crowd had looted the Jakarta home of Ahmad Sahroni, a lawmaker from the political party NasDem, and taken items including household furniture.
Sahroni has faced accusations of responding insensitively to people calling for parliament to be dissolved amid anger over lawmakers’ allowances. Sahroni has labelled such critics “the stupidest people in the world”.
Protests also occurred on the holiday island of Bali, where tear gas was used against demonstrators.
Short-video app TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, said on Saturday that it had suspended its live feature in Indonesia for a few days.
Jakarta had this week summoned representatives of social media platforms, including Meta Platforms Inc and TikTok, and told them to boost content moderation because disinformation had spread online. The government says such disinformation has spurred protests against it.
“In light of the increasing violence in protests in Indonesia, we are taking additional security measures to keep TikTok a safe and civil space,” ByteDance said in a statement.
“As part of this measure, we are voluntarily suspending the TikTok LIVE feature for the next few days in Indonesia,” the statement added.
Indonesia has one of the world’s biggest audiences on TikTok, with more than 100 million users.
In some videos of the protests posted on the service on Saturday, users complained they could not use the live feature.
People had used the popular video app to document the protests, including police firing tear gas and water cannon at protesters.
Wirya Adiwena, the deputy director of Amnesty International Indonesia, told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story that Indonesia’s government seems more interested in ensuring it has “full control of the narratives [and] full control of the protests, instead of addressing the real concerns that people have”.
Adiwena said the government was “bringing back old playbooks”, noting it had also recently passed a law “in which the government managed to quietly, creepingly push the army back into civilian lives, where [the] army now has more control, more presence, really, in civil government”.
