JAKARTA (Reuters) - For months, by Zoom calls and then by jet, Indonesian ministers and officials scoured the world for access to a vaccine for the coronavirus that Southeast Asia’s biggest country is struggling to control. This month, their campaign paid off.Three Chinese companies committed 250 million doses of vaccines to the archipelago of 270 million people. A letter of intent was signed with a UK-based company for another 100 million. Absent from these pledges: the United States. Not only was it not promising any vaccine, but months earlier the United States shocked Indonesian officials by asking to land and refuel its spy planes in the territory, four senior Indonesian officials told Reuters. This would reverse a decades-long policy of strategic neutrality in the country. With the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo due to visit Jakarta on Oct. 29, Washington’s campaign to buttress its influence in the region - part of its escalating global rivalry with China - has been misfiring, say government officials and analysts. On the other hand, China - Indonesia and the region’s biggest investor and trading partner - has won ground with vaccines and trade. America’s strategic interests converge with those of many others in the region; Washington opposes Beijing’s island-building and militarisation of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei dispute China’s territorial claim to over 90% of the waterway. Indonesia does not have a formal claim to the waters, but it, too, opposes China’s claim. China is less popular among Indonesians than the United States, according to polling in 2018 by the Pew Research Center, a think-tank in Washington. This is an edge that the United States under President Donald Trump has blunted, according to interviews with more than a dozen government officials, former diplomats and analysts. Meanwhile China is managing to parlay its economic heft and early recovery from coronavirus restrictions to strategic advantage, they said. “The U.S uses sanctions and muscle too much,” said one Indonesian government source. “China is smart. It always uses the soft power approach, the economic approach, the development approach.” Pompeo said ahead of his visit that there are issues where the United States has already improved the relationship between the countries, “but there’s more that we can do.” U.S. assistant secretary of State David Stillwell said separately the U.S. was working to build a “stronger economic partnership” with Indonesia and the United States had donated 1,000 ventilators to the country, part of a $12.5 million coronavirus aid package.