Australia is launching a formal challenge to the World Trade Organization over heavy tariffs imposed by China on its barley exports.Trade Minister Simon Birmingham acknowledged that appeals to the WTO “are not perfect and they take longer than would be ideal” in announcing the move Wednesday in Canberra. But he said that ultimately “it is the right avenue for Australia to take at this point.”FILE – Australia’s Minister of Trade, Tourism and Investment Simon Birmingham speaks during a signing ceremony with Indonesia’s Trade Minister in Jakarta, Indonesia, March 4, 2019.Beijing imposed an 80.5% anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty on Australian barley back in May after claiming that barley farming was heavily subsidized by the government.The tariffs are expected to cost Australian farmers over $300 million annually.Birmingham said the reasons for China’s heavy tariffs “lack basis” and “are not underpinned by facts and evidence.”Australia’s decision to seek redress with the WTO comes a day after Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned it would report China over information from state-run media that Chinese power plants have been given official approval to import coal from other nations without restrictions, except for Australia.The disputes over Australia’s barley and coal exports to China are the latest chapters in Beijing’s increasingly bitter trade and diplomatic dispute with Canberra, which first turned sour when Canberra banned Chinese-based tech giant Huawei from building its new 5G broadband network, and further deteriorated over Australia’s push for an independent probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected more than a year ago in central China.In addition to the heavy barley tariffs, China has also suspended Australian beef imports and opened two probes into Australia’s lucrative wine import sector, with over $790 million in sales last year. Beijing has also advised its citizens and students to reconsider Australia as a destination for travel and education, citing racial discrimination.China is Australia’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade worth $170 billion last year.
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Scientists at Japan’s space agency on Tuesday confirmed the capsule they recovered last week from their Hayabusa2 probe that had landed on an asteroid did indeed contain samples collected from that heavenly body.The Hayabusa spacecraft was launched in 2014 and arrived at the near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu in 2018. The probe spent about a year and a half orbiting, observing and eventually landing on the asteroid, where it collected samples.It headed back toward Earth last year, finally dropping its collection capsule into Earth’s atmosphere December 5. It was recovered in a remote area of Australia and delivered to the Tokyo-based Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) last week.At a press conference on Tuesday, JAXA scientists said they took their time and great care to open the capsule, to preserve any gases and other materials collected on Ryugu. Until it was opened, they could not be sure they obtained what they were after.In this photo provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), a member of JAXA retrieves a capsule dropped by Hayabusa2 in Woomera, southern Australia, Dec. 6, 2020.JAXA’s Hayabusa project manager Yuichi Tsuda said the capsule contained plenty of soil samples and gas.”It has been more than 10 years since we started this project, and six years have passed since we launched it,” he told reporters. “The asteroid soils that we dreamed of are finally in our hands.”Scientists say they believe the samples, especially ones taken from under the asteroid’s surface, contain valuable data unaffected by space radiation and other environmental factors that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on our planet.They are particularly interested in analyzing organic materials in the samples. JAXA hopes to find clues about how the materials are distributed in the solar system and are related to life on Earth. They intend to distribute portions of their samples to other researchers around the world, including scientists with the U.S. space agency, NASA.
 
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Maria Ressa, who heads a Philippine news website known for its tough scrutiny of President Rodrigo Duterte, refused to enter a plea on Tuesday in a second cyber libel case she faces, saying the charges against her were ludicrous. Ressa, a Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2018, has faced a series of lawsuits that she says amount to intimidation against her and other journalists in a country previously known for upholding press freedom. “I will take this all the way to the end, and we will win it, because it’s ludicrous,” Ressa, CEO of news site Rappler, told reporters outside the court in Manila. Ressa’s counsel, Theodore Te, said they had agreed to a conditional arraignment while waiting for a decision on a motion to quash the charges. Businessman Wilfredo Keng had filed a new cyber libel case against Ressa, accusing her of sharing screenshots of a 2002 article linking him to a criminal report. Keng’s lawyers did not talk to reporters after the hearing. In June, Ressa was convicted of libel over a 2012 article that linked Keng to illegal activities. She faces up to six year in jail but is appealing the ruling. Ressa is also facing several other cases, including tax offenses and violation of foreign-ownership rules in media. She has said the cases are a form of harassment due to her news site’s critical reports on Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, during which more than 5,900 suspected drug dealers and users have been killed in anti-narcotics operations. Duterte has lambasted media agencies for critical reporting on alleged rights abuses in the campaign. In July, lawmakers allied with the president blocked the application of media conglomerate ABS-CBN Corp., which has also angered Duterte, for a congressional franchise renewal. As a result, the country’s biggest broadcaster closed radio stations, shut down provincial offices and laid off thousands of workers.
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Asian markets are down across the board Tuesday over lingering worries about the rising casualties from the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and the stalemate in Washington over a potential new financial relief package.   Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index ended down 0.1%.  The S&P/ASX index in Australia dropped 0.4%.  Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index plunged 0.6%.  The KOSPI index in South Korea lost 0.1%, while Taiwan’s TSEC index plummeted one percent.   Singapore’s Composite lost 1.8 points, but was unchanged percentage-wise (0.06%).  In late afternoon trading, Mumbai’s Sensex is 25 points higher, but is also unchanged percentage-wise (0.09%). In commodities trading, gold is trading at $1,848.30 an ounce, up 0.8%.  U.S. crude oil is selling at $46.82, down 0.3%, and Brent crude oil is down 0.5%. All three major U.S. indices are up in futures trading.    
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Despite calls from exiled Uighurs, International Criminal Court prosecutors say they will not investigate China for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity, according to a report issued December 14. The Uighurs had called for the investigation and provided The Hague-based court evidence in July that they say supports claims of Chinese abuse of the ethnic minority. On Friday, the court asked for more evidence, according to The Guardian newspaper. FILE – Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is seen in a courtroom of the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands, July 8, 2019.But the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it was unable to investigate the matter because China is not a signatory to the ICC, Agence France-Presse reported. “This precondition for the exercise of the court’s territorial jurisdiction did not appear to be met with respect to the majority of the crimes alleged,” Bensouda’s report said.The ICC also said there was “no basis to proceed” on the matter of claims that Uighurs were forcefully deported from Tajikistan and Cambodia back to China.The Uighurs argued that since Tajikistan and Cambodia were ICC signatories, the ICC had jurisdiction to act.China called the claims baseless.Many Western countries, including the United States, say the Chinese government has used the guise of combating religious and political extremism for its “systematic policies” of crackdowns against Uighurs and other minorities, including the detention of 1 million to 1.8 million people in internment camps, political indoctrination, enforced disappearances, destruction of cultural sites, forced labor and coercive birth prevention.FILE – Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, Sept. 4, 2018.In October, 39 United Nations countries condemned China’s treatment of the ethnic minority.The Chinese government has rejected accusations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, saying it is only running a campaign of “transformation-through-education centers.” Chinese officials have called the camps “vocational training” facilities for people who were exposed to “ideas of extremism and terrorism.”Officials have also said the camps teach the people skills needed to undertake new jobs.     
 
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The Philippines aims to finalize negotiations with Sinovac Biotech this week to acquire 25 million doses of the Chinese company’s COVID-19 vaccine for delivery by March, a coronavirus taskforce official said on Monday.President Rodrigo Duterte, who has pursued warmer ties with Beijing, wants to inoculate all his country’s 108 million people, preferably buying vaccines from Russia or China.Philippine officials had met with Sinovac representatives on Friday and there would be another meeting this week to finalize a deal, Carlito Galvez, the country’s vaccine chief, said.”We have already conveyed to them our needs, 25 million for 2021,” Galvez told a news conference, adding that vaccine distribution was targeted for March.Sinovac’s plan to conduct Phase 3 clinical trial in the Philippines is being evaluated by the country’s drugs agency. Trials are taking place in Indonesia and Brazil.Philippine companies last month signed a deal for 2.6 million shots of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, the Southeast Asian nation’s first supply deal for a coronavirus vaccine, for delivery in May or June.Harry Roque, Duterte’s spokesman, told the news conference for people who were waiting on Western vaccine brands, “the Chinese brand will come earlier.”Since taking office in 2016, Duterte has set aside a territorial spat in the South China Sea in exchange for billions of dollars of pledged Chinese aid, loans and investment.But mistrust of China, including of its vaccines, remains widespread in the Philippines, according to an opinion survey conducted in July.The Philippines’ $370 billion economy, among Asia’s fastest growing before the pandemic, fell deeper into recession in the third quarter as broad curbs aimed at controlling the virus battered the economy.With nearly 451,000 COVID-19 infections and more than 8,800 deaths, the Philippines has the second-highest number of cases and fatalities in Southeast Asia, next to Indonesia. 
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In Thailand, a group of ex-lawmakers shut out of national politics by a controversial court order is taking its reform agenda to the provinces by backing like-minded candidates in local elections long dominated by entrenched family networks.Thailand is holding elections to fill its Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAOs) on Dec. 20 for the first time since 2012, having put off local polls after a 2014 coup that brought on five years of military rule.Under the banner of their Progressive Movement, the former lawmakers are campaigning hard for hundreds of candidates with the same broad pro-democracy goals that have been galvanizing the student-led protests roiling Bangkok for the past few months.Thai prominent opposition figure Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit addresses the media as he attends a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok on Sept. 19, 2020.”By competing in the local politics, we have the opportunity to [say] to the people that if we want a democratic Thailand, building a democratic local political base is very important,” the Movement’s co-founder, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, told VOA at the end of a busy day of campaigning late last week.Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha attends a signing ceremony for the agreement to purchase AstraZeneca’s potential COVID-19 vaccine at Government House in Bangkok on Nov. 27, 2020.’The same ideals’National elections for parliament last year nominally returned Thailand to civilian rule. Yet many Thais believe the contest was rigged. Following the election’s inconclusive results, coup leader Prayut Chan-ocha won a parliamentary vote for prime minister thanks to new rules his junta wrote into the constitution and the ballots of a junta-appointed Senate.
The same elections also saw the new Future Forward party, led by Thanathorn, finish a strong third on a progressive platform that struck a chord with younger voters. The party pushed for constitutional amendments what would have rolled back the military’s political privileges and opposed moves to expand the powers of King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
But the party’s time in parliament proved short-lived. Barraged with lawsuits, it was finally brought down in February over a pair of loans the Constitutional Court deemed illegal. The court promptly ordered the party dissolved and its executives barred from public office for the next 10 years. Future Forward called the case a hoax, and its prosecution set in motion the wave of protests now filling Bangkok’s streets.
The protests have taken on a life of their own since coalescing around Future Forward a year ago. A new batch of young activists independent of the former party has taken the reins. Demands for Prayut to step down and stronger checks on the king are now front and center.
But the protesters and the Progressive Movement are still riding the same sweeping reformist current, said Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of the political science faculty at Ubon Ratchathani University.”They have the same ideology … to make Thailand more liberal and more democratic,” he said. “They also have the same feeling that they want Thailand to change, to be a more liberal country, liberal society.”
They may be tackling that goal at different levels of Thai politics, Thanathorn said, but “we share the same ideals.”
“Local politics in Thailand has been dominated by local political dynasties for too much and for too long,” he said. “If we want to see democracy at the national level, I believe it is crucial we build it from the bottom up.”
To that end, the Progressive Movement is backing candidates for PAO chief in 42 of Thailand’s 76 provinces and about 800 other hopefuls running for the roughly 1,900 PAO council seats also up for grabs.A demonstrator holds signs during a pro-democracy rally demanding changes in the monarchy and government in Bangkok, Thailand, Dec. 10, 2020.’A patronage system’Set up in the 1990s to give local communities more say in government, PAOs decide how to spend a share of Thailand’s tax proceeds in each province, mostly on public services from roads and schools to parks and markets. Combined, they dole out about $2.7 billion a year.
But pundits say many PAOs have been all but captured by politically connected family clans that win election after election by handing out jobs and contracts and other benefits while corralling votes for national parties.
“It’s kind of a patronage system,” and one with national implications, said Punchada Sirivunnabood, an associate professor of politics at Thailand’s Mahidol University.
“If the national politicians want to win the elections, they need to ask for support from the local politicians,” she said, and “everyone knows which family controls which province.”
The Progressive Movement wants to upend that system by injecting more competition into each race with new candidates and by putting policy before patronage.Thanathorn said that patronage system often pours money into projects that don’t deliver. He wants to make PAOs more accountable by opening the books on how much money they spend on what and by finding new ways of giving locals a say in how that money gets spent.
Winning won’t be easy. Punchada said the Progressive Movement may manage to pick up votes in some urban areas, where populations skew younger, but will struggle to convince most rural voters to break ties with deep-rooted incumbents.
Titipol also doubts the Movement can carry over the success its progenitor, Future Forward, saw in last year’s national elections. While most of the other major parties that ran won the majority of their parliamentary seats by winning individual constituencies, Future Forward won most of its seats among those apportioned by the total share of votes parties won nationwide. Titipol said the PAO elections are all first-past-the-post races.
The Progressive Movement will also have to make it to election day.
Thailand’s Election Commission is investigating a complaint that the Movement is in effect a political party even though it is not registered as such and claims to not be one. Election laws bar political parties from openly supporting PAO candidates, though analysts say many are well known to be connected informally.The Movement says it is doing nothing wrong. But if convicted by a court, Thanathorn and other Movement leaders could be fined or jailed and see their candidates disqualified.
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The plight during the COVID pandemic of Khim Ha, a 46-year-old Phnom Penh food cart vendor and member of the Khmer Krom ethnic group — which is frequently involved in such small businesses — shows how the pandemic has hit the earnings of the city’s informal workers.
 
Before the pandemic hit, every day she wheeled her food cart to a busy corner in the Chaktomuk commune, or neighborhood, the capital’s hustling central commercial and political quarter home to banks, companies, and branded fashion stores, to sell fried noodles with vegetables, eggs, and beef, chicken or pork breakfasts.
 
Over the past 10 months, as Phnom Penh’s businesses and offices have been closed by the coronavirus, her income has been cut by half because the workers she once fed no longer have jobs.
 
“My sales had been down for months,” she told VOA Khmer Thursday, “It’s been dropping – drop and drop.”Now, a recent outbreak in Phnom Penh and a few of the country’s provinces might be the death knell for her small and struggling business.Cambodia said November 28 it had identified six new cases of COVID-19 but could not contact-trace the source of the infections. In the last two weeks, the number of cases has grown to 40, and the government has ordered people to stay home as much as possible, leaving shopping malls and local markets largely empty.This left Khim Ha facing a choice to either stay home and lose all income or risk infection while continuing to sell fried noodles.“I am also scared deep inside because I can be infected with the virus any time, but I keep protecting myself with masks,” Khim Ha said.She said the risk has not paid off because few people are venturing out, let alone eating street vendor food. To make things worse, she usually claims a spot for her noodle cart on a section of Preah Sihanouk Boulevard, with its well-known shops and now, a COVID-19 cluster of at least seven cases.  Each day she sets up, Khim Ha joins other street vendors, ride-hailing tuk-tuk drivers and all the other self-employed or informal workers with little option but to continue working through the current outbreak.There is no clear estimate of the number of informal workers in Cambodia. The International Labor Organization estimates more than 60% of Cambodians contribute to the informal economy. This does not include the workers employed in agriculture, which is about 33% of the country’s overall workforce and largely informal.  These workers have little or none of the social protections workers in the formal sector enjoy. Tourism and garment industry workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic have received small monthly payments as factories and hotels have closed in the last nine months.
The only way informal workers can receive state benefits is to qualify as “IDPoor,” a state- and donor-funded program that recently started cash transfers of $30 to $40 a month to more than 600,000 poor Cambodian households, or close to 2.4 million people. Before the pandemic, the only IDPoor benefit was free health care.Soeung Tha sells balloons in front of Phnom Penh’s Lanka Temple, Dec. 7, 2020. (Aun Chhengpor/VOA Khmer)A few steps away from Prime Minister Hun Sen’s city residence near the Independence Monument, balloon vendor Soeung Tha looked bored on Monday, standing near his rusty motorcycle with a few helium-filled balloons attached to it.On a normal day, the 35-year-old caters to tourists and Cambodians visiting the monument or the parks around it. The Phnom Penh resident earned at least $7.50 a day from their balloon purchases.  Staring at the near-empty grand intersection, usually bustling with traffic, he said he had only few profitable days over the past two weeks.“In my worst days, I could at least make a sale of up to 30,000 riel [$7.50],” Soeung Tha said. “But this is beyond the worst. Not a single person has bought a single balloon since this morning.”Soeung Tha began selling balloons in 2014 after he returned from Thailand, where he was an undocumented migrant worker. He said balloon sales had not been bad during the first few months of the pandemic, but the recent outbreak fueled by community transmission was hurting his family’s income. The father of three, he pays for his children’s education and household expenses while helping a brother repay his loans.“That’s why I cannot stay at home,” Tha said.An October United Nations Development Program forecast estimated that Cambodia’s post-pandemic poverty rate could rise to 17.6%, putting around 1.34 million people into poverty.Chan Dara, 36, was a hospitality trainer before funding dried up at the vocational training institute that employed him. The institution closed in April, and Chan Dara dipped into his savings to purchase a tuk-tuk so he could be a registered driver with ride-sharing applications Grab and PassApp.  He earned a steady living with rides from the popular Aeon Mall in Phnom Penh’s affluent Tonle Bassac commune.   However, the mall closed on November 28 for a few days   after a woman there showed COVID symptoms.
 
Chan Dara, who was not at the mall that day because his tuk-tuk was broken, learned of the closure through Facebook.Now the mall is open but there are no customers. Photos posted by Facebook users show the mall is almost deserted. Chan Dara said he will continue to wait outside the mall, hoping to make even $10 a day, or half what he earned before the current outbreak.“I would feel bored and hungry if I stayed at home – it would be a certain financial crisis at home,” he said.Vorn Pov, president of the Independent Democracy of Informal Economy Association, said informal workers and small businesses were in a difficult situation.“If you look at them in a bigger picture, they cannot stay at home at all as they have to spend all day earning whatever they can,” Vorn Pov said. “They will not have food to eat and go hungry if they stay at home.”  Vorn Pov criticized the government’s social protection package, which he said is doing little to help informal workers and their families. Informal workers are also not recognized by the labor code, and cannot unionize to push for better protections, which is why Vorn Pov’s group is an association and not a workers’ union.Theng Panhathon, head of the Planning Ministry’s General Department of Planning, which handles the IDPoor program, said the social protections offered by the government reached around 700,000 poor families nationwide.“It does not mean the government does not care about them [informal workers] but we all know about the government’s budgetary situation,” Theng Panhathon said. “At this point, we need to humbly ask for our people’s understanding.”  
 
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Last summer, prominent Cambodian activist monk Bor Bet participated in protests triggered by the arrest of labor leader Rong Chhun. Now the monk has fled to Thailand with other Cambodian dissidents, vowing to return home.Like many Cambodian Buddhist monks, Bor Bet has embraced activism, working with a loose coalition of movements bedeviling the increasingly authoritarian government of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Advocates for democracy, labor unions, human rights and the environment, they participate in each other’s demonstrations.When authorities arrested Rong Chhun, a veteran human rights defender, July 31 and charged him with “incitement to cause social unrest,” he was pursuing the case of farmers in Tbong Khmum, a province on the Vietnam border, whose land had been seized as part of the official demarcation of the border, long a contentious issue.The informal alliance of activists, Bor Bet among them, quickly took to the streets of Phnom Penh. The protests supporting Rong Chhun were deemed illegal by the government which arrested and charged at least 12 people with “incitement to commit a felony or cause social unrest,” and “obstructing the authorities.”Local rights groups contended the charges were part of the FILE – Activist monk Sim Sovandy holds a sign reading ‘Free Mr. Rong Chhun’ in front of Phnom Penh Municipal Court in August 2020. (Photo courtesy Sim Sovandy)Bor Bet also knew that But Buntenh, who founded the Independent Monk Network for Social Justice, had fled Cambodia after being harassed by police for his outspoken stance on land dispossession and environmental degradation. But Buntenh now lives in the U.S.With the group invitation, Bor Bet said he sensed a ruse because he knew the Phnom Penh monk council was targeting him for his activism. They “wanted to arrest and defrock me and they knew … I would flee if they only called me,” he told the VOA Khmer Service.Khim Sorn, Phnom Penh’s chief monk, told VOA the invitation to the monks at Broyuvong Pagoda was for a routine meeting and there was no intention of defrocking Bor Bet.  Khim Sorn said monks are not allowed to participate in protests and if they wanted to do so, they should leave the monkhood and continue their demonstrations as ordinary citizens.Bor Bet, along with fellow monk Sim Sovandy, retreated to a pagoda in the remote Sorng Rukhavorn Wildlife Sanctuary in the northern province of Oddar Meanchey on the Thai border. A monk since the age of 13, Bor Bet said he left the capital city because he didn’t “want to be arrested and, especially, I don’t want to be defrocked.”Sim Sovandy told VOA that Cambodian authorities had “attempted to imprison me.”“I always join protests when there is any injustice and people are mistreated,” he said. “They were ready to arrest me, so I had to flee now.”Flight to ThailandThe forested area reminded Bor Bet of his childhood surroundings, but he fled as soon as the chief monk learned from his local contacts that authorities were planning to arrest the dissident monks.On Nov. 17, Bor Bet and Sim Sovandy fled to Thailand. They stayed for a week at a temple in Bangkok that had taken in another Cambodian monk. They then moved on to a second Thai temple that offers refuge to Cambodian monks. Bor Bet is now at a temple in Samut Prakan province, south of Bangkok. Sim Sovandy, who became a monk in 1989 and is now 46, took refuge at a pagoda temple in Pathum Thani province in central Thailand.Khieu Sopheak, a spokesperson for Cambodia’s Interior Ministry, said he could not confirm if Bor Bet or Sim Sovandy were wanted by law enforcement officials. He said they would face legal trouble only if they participated in “illegal protests.”“You can ask the Venerable whether he participated in any illegal demonstration,” said Khieu Sopheak using the honorific title for a monk.“The authorities only arrest people who commit something wrong,” he said.Bor Bet, one of five siblings, grew up in the then-lush forests of the Kampong Thom’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary. The deforestation of Prey Lang contributed to his activism.“I was born and grew up in the forests. Our forests are lost and I feel regret,” he said.Bor Bet, who decided on his own to become a monk, is a 2016 graduate of Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University in Phnom Penh, where he double-majored in Buddhist philosophy and law in 2016. He also earned a master’s degree in public administration in 2019 at Preah Sihamoniraja Buddhist University in Phnom Penh.He said he realized his secular and ecclesiastical studies meant little if he didn’t use what he had learned to help people.“If I just eat and stay in a pagoda without caring about the suppression of people and deforestation, I can’t do it,” said Bor Bet. “I feel the pain.”Today in Thailand, Bor Bet is contemplating his future as his mother worries. A farmer in Kampong Thom province, Ouk Phuon, 57, hasn’t seen him in five months.“He told me not to worry about him but I do although I am a bit relieved since he has fled. I was afraid that he will be mistreated,” she said.Bor Bet wants to return to Cambodia. “I want to get involved in politics,” he said. “Maybe in the next 10 years, I will leave the monkhood and get involved in politics by joining any party which is democratic. I will return.”This story originated in VOA’s Khmer Service. 
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Tesla, the U.S. automaker, will send delegations to Indonesia next month to discuss potential investment in a supply chain for its electric vehicles, the government said on Saturday in a statement.President Joko Widodo has touted Indonesia’s nickel reserves on a number of occasions, telling Reuters last month that “it’s very important because we have a great plan to make Indonesia the biggest producer of lithium batteries and we have the biggest nickel (reserves).”The president and Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime and investment, were on a call with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday to discuss “investment opportunities from electric vehicles company Tesla in Indonesia,” the ministry said.Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.Luhut told Reuters last month that “there is a really good chance” that companies will want to invest in Indonesian nickel processing to cut costs.Musk has said he is planning to offer a ‘giant contract for a long period of time” so long as the nickel is mined “efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”Indonesia is keen to develop a full supply chain for nickel at home, especially for extracting battery chemicals, making batteries and eventually building EVs.
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Laos is pushing ahead with four dams across the mainstream of the Mekong River, despite an escalating chorus of objections and crippling debt to Chinese state banks which resulted in the loss of control over its electricity grid to China.For almost two decades scientists and environmentalists have said Laos’ mega dam designs could irreversibly damage fish stocks, including endangered mammals like the Irrawaddy dolphin, and risked bankrupting the country.Deputy Energy and Mines minister Sinava Souphanouvong recently said Laos would build 100 dams across the country by 2030, adding that 78 were already operational and capable of producing 9,972 megawatts of electricity.Authorities say the tiny one-party state will be enriched by a series of dams generating hydropower from China in the north to Cambodia in the south, making it the “battery of Asia.”The four most contentious dams straddle the Mekong at four locations stretching from Pak Beng in the north along the river through Luang Prabang and Pak Lay and Sanakham, not far from the capital, Vientiane.  Officials hope to sell the electricity produced from those dams to Thailand.  A fifth at Xayaburi, about midway along the Pak Beng-Sanakham stretch, is already operational.However, Souphanouvong will be hard-pressed to convince critics.An editorial in ASEAN Today, an online commentary site, accused Lao authorities of making up impact assessments for the Sanakham dam. It claimed a report filed with the Mekong River Commission, an intergovernmental organization that coordinates management of the river, was copied from the assessment for Pak Lay, which was plagiarized from the Pak Beng report.Thailand and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, which had backed dam construction for two decades, ignoring pleas from scientists, environmentalists and fishers, is now having second thoughts.Somkiat Prajamwong, secretary-general of Thailand’s Office of National Water Resources, warned that Laos could be assuming too much in terms of sales, stressing no agreement had been reached on Sanakham electricity sales.“If we have other sources that will not have an impact on us, we’ll buy power from those sources,” he told reporters, referring to the potential impact on agricultural and fishing from decreased water flow due to the dams.“The Energy Ministry is discussing conditions, and the condition may be that the source has no impact on Thailand. We need more clarity,” he said.Drought and debtThailand, Cambodia and southern Vietnam, all of which are downstream on the Mekong from Laos, have endured a two-year drought, imperiling the livelihoods of 70 million people living hand to mouth.January-October rainfall was down by a quarter last year, and by more than a third this year, compared with 2018, according to the Mekong River Commission, and the U.S.-based Stimson Center has accused Laos and China of water hoarding through the dams.As a result, fishermen say, stocks have fallen dramatically and sediment flows – needed to replenish riverbanks – are being depleted, increasing the risks to buildings along the Mekong’s banks, while Vietnam has bitterly complained about saltwater intrusion from the sea.“We’ve seen significant negative impacts on the river and questions over its long-term sustainability,” Bradley Murg, a senior research fellow at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, said.The cluster of five dams around Xayaburi cost a total of about $12.5 billion, which compares with Laos’ roughly $18 billion gross domestic product. Most of the cost was funded by Chinese state bank loans.Three months ago, snowballing debt forced Laos to cede control of its electricity to China Southern Power Grid Co., and Murg said Western government doubts about Vientiane’s ability to repay the loans tied it firmly to China in their eyes.“At the end of the day it’s why they recognize that Laos is one of China’s main client states in the region,” he said.“Laos has decided to bandwagon with Beijing and will not say a word against it in public,” he said.“This has signaled to states like Vietnam, like Cambodia, like Laos, that China has the leverage. China is the upstream state and thus has the control,” Murg said.CredibilityEleven dams are planned for the mainstream of the world’s 12th-largest river system, and Marcus Hardtke, a German environmental lawyer who has followed Mekong issues for two decades, said dam construction is about businesses making money.“People always talk about impacts, fish stocks, livelihoods and all that, and all that is true, but what people don’t realize is this is a business, and the money is in the construction of these dams.“So the key people involved in this, they make money out of building these things. This is simply a money-making deal,” he said.At a rare regional forum in Pakse, in southern Laos, three weeks ago, held by the Mekong commission, officials and developers were urged to reassess their commitment to dams and at least improve environmental assessments and ensure the timely release of water during droughts.That meeting was also held in response to the July 2018 collapse of the Xe Pian Xe Namnoy dam in southern Laos, killing 71 people and displacing 7,000 more.Souphanouvong said the collapse “was a big lesson for Laos, leading the government to review safety standards in hydropower development to avoid further loss of life and destruction.”However, Hardtke said this was difficult to believe given warnings over safety, fish stocks and the economic consequences which have fallen on deaf ears for the last two decades.“It’s a classic example of low-quality work, of corruption in construction and shoddy maintenance,” he said in regard to the dam collapse. “It leads back to just making money out of these things and not really caring for impact or sustainability – and then these things happen.”
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The U.S. added China’s biggest computer chipmaker SMIC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies last week, a move that will further widen the gap between China’s chip technology and the rest of the world.Despite its status as the world’s factory, China has never figured out how to make advanced chips. In recent years, Beijing has been planning a series of sweeping government policies and pouring billions of dollars into the industry to fulfill its chip self-sufficiency goal.So far, under ever-tightening international export controls, however, the country has only found itself mired in some of the most embarrassing industrial failures in its recent history. Most notably, one of the nation’s most high-profile chipmakers was taken over by municipal authorities in its home city of Wuhan, and a Beijing-based chipmaker, the Tsinghua Unigroup, defaulted on a corporate bond.FILE – A Chinese microchip is seen through a microscope set up at the booth for the state-controlled Tsinghua Unigroup project which is driving China’s semiconductor ambitions during the 21st China Beijing International High-tech Expo in Beijing.In this highly internationally integrated industry, experts say, no country can manufacture chips on its own, and China’s efforts to develop its semiconductor sector remains out of reach.Highly globalized chainSemiconductor production is considered one of the most sophisticated manufacturing processes in the world, involving more than 50 disciplines. Billions of transistor structures must be built within a few millimeters.The core equipment used to manufacture computer chips includes lithography machines. A Dutch company called ASML is the only company in the world currently capable of producing high-end extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Of its 17 core suppliers, though, more than half are from the United States, and the rest are companies located throughout Europe.The company is jointly owned by shareholders from dozens of countries. According to its official website, among the top three major shareholders, two are from the United States and one is from the United Kingdom. Capital Research and Management Co. is the largest shareholder, and the second largest is the BlackRock Group; both are in the U.S. Additionally, Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung also hold shares in ASML, allowing these two manufacturers to enjoy the priority right to purchase the machine.   In Bid to Rely Less on US, China Firms Stockpile Taiwan Tech HardwareChina wants to become technologically self-reliant in 10 years but needs help for nowWhile ASML may dominate the chipmaking machine market, it is only one part of the long chain in the industry. The lens of its lithography machine is manufactured by Zeiss of Germany, the laser technology is owned by Cymer of the United States, and a French company provides key valves.Jan-Peter Kleinhans, a senior researcher at the Berlin think tank New Responsibility Foundation and director of the Technology and Geopolitics Project, said no country can make chips without foreign companies’ technology. He told VOA in a telephone interview that it took ASML more than two decades to develop their machines, and “they rely themselves on a network of around 5,000 suppliers to build this machine.”Kleinhans said that without the participation of any one of these companies, the entire global semiconductor chain would break.Kobe Goldberg, a researcher at the New American Security Research Center, told VOA that what China is trying to do is to build a totally nationalized supply chain in a highly internationalized industry. “That is much more difficult in an industry like semiconductors since it is so internationally integrated.”John Lee, a senior researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a think tank in Germany, said several Chinese firms already have the capacity to manufacture or fabricate some semiconductors. But they can easily face a crackdown by the U.S. government since American companies have a very strong dominance in the upstream segment of the supply chain, such as chip design.
 Huawei’s Survival at Stake as US Sanctions LoomStarting Sept. 15, China’s telecom giant Huawei will be cut off from essential supplies of semiconductors and without those chips, Huawei cannot make smartphones or 5G equipment on which its business depends, business analysts say”The dominance of U.S.-origin technology in upstream sectors of the global semiconductor supply chain means that Chinese ICT [information and communications technology] firms across the board are exposed to U.S. export controls, regardless of what happens to SMIC or Huawei as individual companies,” Lee added.Multilateral export controlThe multilateral export control implemented by democratic countries can be traced back to the informal multilateral regime called the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom).  Established in 1949, the 17-member organization, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Australia, attempted to coordinate controls over the export of strategic materials and technology to communist countries. In 1952, a separate group was established to scrutinize exports to China.US Imposes Curbs on Exports by China’s Top Chipmaker SMICNew Commerce Department requirements mean American suppliers of certain technology products to SMIC must apply for individual licenses before they can exportAlthough CoCom ceased to function on March 31, 1994, the list of prohibited items it formulated was later inherited by another multilateral export agreement, the Wassenaar Arrangement, which was signed in 1996. As many as 42 European, American and Asian countries joined the program, which allows member states to exercise control over their own technology exports, and China is again included in the list of targeted countries.Last December, the group reached an agreement to add chip manufacturing technology to the list of items subject to export controls.  While this revision does not explicitly target China, it points out that export restrictions are targeted at nonmember states, while China, along with Iran and North Korea, are not member states. Some Chinese observers called the jointly implemented move a “collective action” against China by countries that dominate the chip manufacturing supply chain.The Bureau of Industrial Security of the U.S. Commerce Department also announced in October of this year that six emerging technologies would be included in a new export control under the Wassenaar Agreement. All these technologies are directly related to chip manufacturing, including extreme ultraviolet lithography necessary for advanced chip manufacturing.Martijn Rasser, a senior researcher at the Center for New American Security’s Technology and National Security Project, told VOA the world’s liberal democracies have a huge advantage in their network of alliances and partnerships, adding: “It’s something that China just completely lacks, and that’s a big, a big headwind for them.”
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