Technology and Innovation

Emmanuel Macron won the French presidency--the youngest man ever to accede to the Élysée palace. But what does it mean for French and U.S. tech?

Rachel Brown, Sherry Cho, Larry Hong, Gabriella Meltzer, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. Anies elected Jakarta’s next governor. Anies Baswedan, Indonesia’s former education minister, beat out sitting governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (better known as Ahok) in a closely contested election. While official results have not yet been released, Anies clearly leads in polls. This year’s gubernatorial campaign was plagued by ethnic and racial tensions. Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, was accused of blasphemy for remarks made in September regarding a Koranic verse. And although he garnered the largest share of votes in the first round of voting in February, he did not win the necessary simple majority. In the subsequent runoff race, religion may have played a decisive role in his defeat; Anies, who is Muslim, placed second in February and may have gained votes from supporters of third-place candidate Agus Yudhoyono, who is also Muslim. Ahok’s trial is ongoing, but he is unlikely to face jail time even if found guilty. Observers worry that the election results may empower conservative Islamic groups in both in the city itself and across the nation. The divisive role of religion and ethnicity in the Jakarta campaign could also foreshadow similar frictions in the 2019 presidential election. For now, the new mayor will face not only the challenge of uniting the city, but also of addressing a range of problems including those involving public education and urban infrastructure. 2. India’s women-to-men ratio expected to decline rapidly. According to a report released this week by the Indian government, the ratio of women to men among those ages fifteen to thirty-four is expected to drop precipitously over the course of the coming decades. According to data from both the Indian government census and the World Bank, the ratio will drop from 939 girls per 1,000 boys to only 898 girls per 1,000 boys by 2031. This stark gender imbalance is a result of the decades-long practice of female infanticide, evidence of which began to appear when ultrasounds were first introduced to the country in the 1980s. Parents’ strong preference for male children is based on perceptions that only males will be able to financially care for their parents in old age, that family lineage should be passed through sons, and that the practice of dowries will “financially cripple” families. Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, remarked that many Indian families are still choosing to have boys despite declining fertility rates, even as incomes and education levels rise. Although the practice of prenatal sex determination was officially banned in 1994, its enforcement has been lax at best. 3. Bluster billows over USS Carl Vinson bluff. Sparking ridicule and bewilderment throughout Asia, the revelation that the Pentagon did not send the USS Carl Vinson carrier directly toward North Korea, as U.S. officials had stated, also sparked questions about the coherence of the U.S. strategy toward North Korea. The reveal on Wednesday—that the carrier strike group was actually thousands of miles away and had been heading away from South Korea—caused many in South Korea to question the Trump administration’s leadership and strategy in Asia. It also caused turmoil in South Korea during an already turbulent election period. After South Korea’s Defense Ministry declined to comment substantively on the issue, critics accused the ministry of aggravating anxieties in an election where North Korea’s nuclear program and Seoul’s close military relationship with Washington have been central issues. In China, the USS Carl Vinson episode prompted ridicule on social and news media, much of it directed at the perceived gullibility of foreign media and the Trump administration’s attempts to stymie Pyongyang. The incident provoked much less coverage in Japan, with many top officials declining to comment on the level of communication with Washington regarding policy toward North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson is now on its way to the Korean peninsula and is expected to arrive in the region next week. 4. Support slips for Duterte’s drug war. The latest public opinion poll on Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war shows declining—though still high—support. 78 percent of respondents reported they were satisfied with the government’s crackdown on illegal drugs, down from 85 percent in a similar poll taken in December 2016. The amount of dissatisfied respondents rose from 8 to 12 percent. The poll also shows that 73 percent of Filipinos were worried that they or someone they know would be a victim of extrajudicial killing. Since assuming office on June 30, 2016, President Duterte has put in place a controversial drug policy that involves calling upon Filipinos to kill drug addicts and suspected criminals. Since the implementation of the policy, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have criticized the drug war on a number of grounds, including extrajudicial killings, disproportionate targeting of the poor, and fabrication of police evidence. Despite these alarming features, however, support for the drug war has remained high, including among young, liberal Filipinos. In response to the latest decline in public satisfaction, Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella said that “there seems to be consistency in the way the public appreciates the [anti-drug] efforts.” 5. Baidu to share self-driving car technology. Chinese search giant Baidu has been steadily expanding its AI research and investment in self-driving vehicles in recent years. This week, Baidu announced it will go one step further by releasing a platform for self-driving cars to the public this July. The platform, named Apollo, will provide access to systems for mapping, operations, and vehicle control. Initially the technology will only be available for use in limited areas, but ultimately the hope is to make it accessible for all road types by the end of the decade. Industry analysts see the move as a way for Baidu to accelerate the production of self-driving cars, assume an important role in the supply chain for such vehicles, and collect and analyze data on how the cars operate. Other major Chinese internet companies including Alibaba and Tencent have also been investing in the autonomous vehicle sector, along with firms in the United States and Europe. But open-source technology could help push Baidu closer to beating out competitors. Already car manufacturers in China, Germany, and the United States are reportedly interested in using the Apollo platform. Baidu’s decision to grant open access to its information is not without precedent. Tesla granted access to its patents to accelerate the development of the electric car market, and Google made its Android platform open source as well. Bonus: South Korea swaps coins for cards. On Thursday, South Korea took an important step on the road to a coinless—and possibly even cashless—future. Beginning this week, customers at some popular stores, such as CU, 7-Eleven, and Lotte Department Stores, can elect to deposit their small change onto cards rather than receiving it in coins. If the limited trial is successful, change could be deposited directly into bank accounts as early as next year. The shift would not only streamline shoppers’ transactions, but also save the government nearly $50 million a year that it would normally spend on minting coins. Even before the trial began, South Korea had the foundation for transitioning into a cashless society: according to the Bank of Korea, only 20 percent of payments are made with cash, over 60 percent of South Koreans do not use coins, and the rate of credit card ownership is relatively high at around 1.9 per citizen. Other Asian governments, such as those in Singapore and India, are also pushing to reduce the size of their cash economies to cut costs or combat tax evasion and corruption.

Rachel Brown is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the third part of a series on migration trends in India and China. India’s outsourcing and IT sectors are on edge. The combination of recent congressional proposals to alter the H-1B visa program, President Donald J. Trump’s vitriolic statements, and his draft executive order on visa reform looms large for heavily visa-reliant companies. Currently, roughly 70 percent of H-1B visas go to Indian nationals. But that could all soon change. H-1B visas are intended for temporary skilled workers, but some politicians perceive abuse of system, in which employers allegedly substitute foreigners for more expensive U.S. labor. Recent bills crafted by both House Republicans and Democrats seek to eliminate perceived loopholes, as well as to raise the base salary required for an H-1B visa up from $60,000 to anywhere from $100,000 to $130,000. It is unclear whether such bills will be enacted or what form executive action might take, but the increasingly hostile climate toward foreign workers in the United States will no doubt hit Indian IT firms particularly hard. Just three of these firms – Wipro, Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services – together accounted for over 12,000 H-1B visas granted in 2014. But could greater visa restrictions on Asian workers going to the United States have the silver lining of promoting greater talent circulation within Asia? Two of the first places Indian firms may look in their quest to diversify are Japan and China, the two largest economies after the United States. But neither country is known for its openness to foreign workers. So what kind of reception might Indian companies and workers expect? Japan actually appears increasingly eager to attract and host skilled foreigners. Reforms to the country’s permanent residency system released this year by the Ministry of Justice would shave down the waiting period for skilled foreigners. Instead of waiting five to ten years, workers will now be able to apply after just one to three years, depending on how many points they accrue based on their education, profession, and salary. The changes go into effect at the end of this month. While Japan’s proposed immigration reforms received an enthusiastic response in Indian media sources, reasons remain for skepticism over whether a country with such notoriously stringent immigration policies can truly open up. On the face of it, Chinese companies too appear ready to welcome foreign tech workers displaced from the United States. In November, Baidu CEO Robin Li criticized Trump advisors’ hostility toward foreigners in Silicon Valley. He added, “so I myself hope that many of these engineers will come to China to work for us…In the past, Chinese IT companies can only attract Chinese engineers from abroad. We would now like to hire more engineers from different backgrounds around the world, because China is the fastest growing major market, so let’s all work together.” The Chinese government also looks increasingly supportive of attracting foreign talent to promote innovation. Recent immigration reforms include a streamlined work permit program being piloted in select provinces and municipalities. Additionally, in July news leaked of plans to set up China’s first immigration agency under the Ministry of Public Security. Restrictions on permanent residency were also eased slightly last year; individuals working for certain science, technology, or other research-oriented entities in both the public and private sectors can now apply. In 2016, the number of foreign permanent residents increased by 163 percent, although the country still granted a mere 1,576 new green cards. Chinese officials would like to see that number rise further. As Indian IT companies look to expand in China, they will need to consider not just government policies, but also their own mixed records of success in the country. Tata Consultancy Services has operated in China since 2002. However, its business has grown slowly and is not yet profitable. Others are faring better. Infosys, which posted revenues of approximately $120 million in China in 2015, aims to more than double its employees in China. Meanwhile, management training firm NIIT opened a data and IT training center in Guizhou’s provincial capital this year. Digging deeper, however, the prospects dim for would-be H-1B visa recipients to relocate to China. The foreign talent that Chinese firms and officials hope to attract is mostly made up of skilled engineers and coders, essentially the cream of the H-1B crop. But many individuals sent to the United States by outsourcing firms are not programmers but managers and other less technical personnel. Moreover, acquiring a Chinese green card remains an onerous process with high skill, salary, and/or investment barriers even after reform. Even the pilot work permit system classifies workers into buckets of “high-end personnel, professional personnel and the temporary and seasonal personnel,” and seeks to manage flows from the latter two categories. An early test of Indian technology firms’ ability to reorient toward China, Japan, and other Asian markets will come from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations. Prior to the most recent round of discussions, Indian negotiators pushed for more liberal policies on services and greater freedom of migration. But whether India’s proposals will be included in a final agreement remains uncertain. ASEAN countries have previously resisted pairing open markets with open immigration policies; similar opposition from both ASEAN and Northeast Asian states could hamper RCEP negotiations. At present the likelihood remains low that any but the highest-skilled Indian IT professionals could relocate to China or Japan in the wake of a dramatic change to the U.S. H-1B visa program. Eventually, however, improving regional labor mobility will be necessary to address Asia’s impending demographic reality. Ironically, as the U.S. government seeks out all manner of ways to tighten borders, historically closed-off Asian states may be the ones to embrace and benefit from immigration.

Rachel Brown, Sherry Cho, Larry Hong, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. Samsung heir indicted on corruption charges. Lee Jae-yong, the de facto head of Samsung Group, was formally indicted on Tuesday on bribery and embezzlement charges. Lee’s indictment was the culmination of a ninety-day special prosecutor investigation of an intensifying corruption scandal that has already brought about President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. Lee was arrested on February 17 but was not formally indicted until February 28 on charges that include allegedly paying roughly $38 million (43 billion won) to Choi Soon-sil, Park’s close confidante and corruption scandal linchpin, and two nonprofit foundations Choi controlled. Samsung is one of eight Korean conglomerates that has admitted to making payments to Choi and her nonprofit foundations, but claims that the payments were made under coercion. The alleged bribes were purportedly made in exchange for the South Korean government’s backing of a contentious merger in 2015 of two Samsung affiliates that helped Lee inherit corporate control from his father. The merger allegedly enlarged the stock value of the Lee family by at least $758 million at the cost of at least $123 million in losses for the national pension fund, which held large stakes in the two affiliates. Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, has been twice convicted of bribery and tax evasion but was presidentially pardoned both times by then-presidents Kim Young-sam and Lee Myung-bak. At least six of South Korea’s top ten chaebol conglomerates—which generate a revenue equivalent to more than 80 percent of South Korean gross domestic product—are led by men once convicted of white-collar crimes. Four other Samsung senior executives were also indicted on February 28, but not arrested, on the same corruption charges as Mr. Lee; three of the four have resigned. 2. Self-proclaimed Islamic State targets China in new video. A video released by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) showed a Uighur fighter in Iraq conducting an execution and proclaiming to China, “We will come to you to clarify to you with the tongues of our weapons, to shed blood like rivers and avenging the oppressed.” It also features shots of Chinese police conducting surveillance, most likely in Xinjiang, and a burning Chinese flag. The video follows other China-focused media released by IS, including an online chant issued in Mandarin in December 2015, which encouraged Chinese Muslims to “take up weapons to fight.” Some Chinese nationals have heeded the call, and an estimated one hundred to three hundred Uighurs, including children and the elderly, have traveled to Iraq and Syria. The video comes at a particularly unfortunate time for Chinese officials already on edge about violence in Xinjiang. Security tightened dramatically following a knife attack in the autonomous region in mid-February, and over ten thousand troops rallied in the provincial capital this week. In the long run, however, it is unclear whether this crackdown will improve public safety or simply drive further radicalization. 3. Philippine fight against HIV falters as rates climb. Since 1984, when HIV was first reported in the Philippines, the prevalence and spread of the virus were described as “low and slow.” Between 2010 and 2015, the rate of new infections climbed by more than 50 percent—the highest in all of Asia. Though the population-wide prevalence is still relatively low today, the epidemic is widespread among young people. According to the Philippine Department of Health, 57 percent of young gay men in high school or college are at risk for contracting HIV, and 67 percent of those who are HIV positive are between fifteen and twenty-four years old. To combat the epidemic, this past Valentine’s Day the National Youth Commission launched an anti-HIV campaign called “Virus Ends With Us,” which aims to teach parents and educators how to approach taboo subjects and help eliminate stigma surrounding the condition. Unfortunately, stakeholders are of different minds as to how to fight the skyrocketing infection rates: last month, a coalition of conservative politicians, parents, and the Roman Catholic Church pressured the Departments of Health and Education to halt a proposed program that would have provided sexual education and distributed condoms in schools. 4. More Chinese students study abroad, and more return home. According to China’s Ministry of Education, around 80 percent of Chinese students studying abroad, or “sea turtles” as they are called in China (because the word is a homophone for “returning from overseas”), have returned home, in contrast to about one-third in 2006. While Beijing claims that the record number of returnees is due to the fact that the Chinese job market has become increasingly appealing, the reality could be more complex. In the United States, which is the most popular destination for Chinese students, the demand for foreign skilled-workers visas, known as H-1Bs, often far outstrips the supply of such visas, forcing the U.S. government to employ a lottery system. A seasoned immigration lawyer suggested that the chance of being selected in the lottery in 2014 is about 50 percent. Those who are not chosen will be forced to return home or apply to another degree program. H-1B visa sponsors also generally favor technology experts and those with more advanced degrees, and most Chinese students are enrolled in master programs in business and marketing. Beijing is at least partly correct on one count: many “sea turtles” are returning to China to join the frenzied startup boom in China, thanks in large part to the Chinese government’s generous financial support for startups. 5. Xiaomi debuts smartphone chip. Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of China’s Xiaomi mobile phone company, showed off the firm’s first internally developed chip, the Pengpai S1, on Tuesday. The chip was produced by Xiaomi subsidiary Beijing Pinecone Electronics, and the entire endeavor cost more than one billion RMB ($145 million). The company received government support in developing the chip, although the exact value of that assistance remains unknown. Xiaomi now ranks among just two phone companies in China (the other is Huawei) and four international companies to create its own chip. The new smartphone processor is a major coup in China’s ongoing effort to strengthen its domestic semiconductor sector and reduce reliance on foreign manufacturers, particularly Qualcomm. Chinese firms have also sought to purchase semiconductor manufacturers abroad and acquire their technology, although foreign investment reviews have at times hampered such acquisitions. Chinese authorities and private companies are spending big on the semiconductor push, and now these efforts appear to be paying off. Bonus: India to publish first official sign language dictionary. This month, the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center (ISLRTC) in Delhi, a group established by India’s ministry of social justice, will publish the first installment of its Indian Sign Language (ISL) dictionary. Though a university released another ISL dictionary early last year, ISLRTC’s promises to be the country’s first official and most comprehensive version, containing six thousand words in English and Hindi and forty-four different hand shapes under which each sign is categorized. India is estimated to have as many as 7 million deaf individuals (and only 300 certified ISL interpreters), with significant linguistic variation between sign languages of different regions. The ISLRTC dictionary promises not only to take into account regional variations in ISL, but also to improve ISL practitioners’ awareness of syntax and grammar necessary for communicating through written language. According to one ministry official, among all persons living with disabilities in India, deaf individuals have the lowest literacy rate. ISLRTC undertook its project as a part of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill 2016, which requires the government “to ensure that persons with disabilities can access an inclusive, quality, and free primary education and secondary education on an equal basis with others in the communities in which they live.”

President Donald J. Trump’s initial forays into foreign policy suggest a desire to abdicate the throne. Not his own position as president of course, but rather the United States’ position as the world’s preeminent power—both as a driver of a globalized world and a defender of the traditional liberal order. He has withdrawn the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Asia-Pacific trade pact that would have cemented U.S. leadership among the economies that make up 40 percent of the world’s GDP. He has claimed that climate change is a hoax and wants to raise the U.S. fossil fuel industry from the dead. He is moving forward to build a wall to prevent Mexican citizens from crossing through to the United States, and he has issued a ban on Muslims traveling to the United States from seven different countries. (Whatever happened to the “welcoming pledges” that cities all across the United States adopted in the late 2000s to help immigrants adapt and thrive?) His brand of “Make America Great Again,” rejects the notion that American greatness depends in large measure on values that underpin the current global system. Thus, President Trump has little interest in supporting—much less leading—a globalized world. Who, then, can fill the vacuum? Leading in an era of globalization requires three things: domestic institutions that promote the free flow of goods, information, and people; the economic wherewithal to shape world affairs; and the vision to look beyond one’s own immediate interests. Surprisingly, it is not difficult to find countries that fit the bill. To begin with, there are countries that epitomize open markets in the form of free trade and investment. Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand achieve top status, but they are too small to drive the world economy. China as the world’s largest trading nation would certainly qualify in economic heft but it fails the test of openness, ranking 144th on Heritage’s “Economic Freedom” scale. The countries that rank high on both metrics include the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Also essential to a well-functioning globalized world is the free flow of information. Here, too, tiny countries take top billing. Estonia and Iceland rank first and second in net freedom. But Canada, the United States, Germany, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom follow closely on their heels. China, in contrast, ranked last out of the sixty-five countries evaluated by Freedom House, earning it the title of “worst of the worst.” Globalization also relies on the free flow of people. Unsurprisingly, large liberal democracies dominate the top group. The countries perceived as having the most open immigration policies are Canada, Australia, Germany, Singapore (an exception to the rule), and the United States. To be fair, however, the countries that bear the burden of the largest number of refugees are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and Ethiopia. While openness to the flow of goods and services, information, and people is critical to leadership in a globalized world, countries must also demonstrate the capacity to adopt the interests of the broader international community as one’s own. For example, when disaster strikes, who can be counted on to help? In terms of humanitarian assistance, the United States stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world, spending more than twice as much as the United Kingdom, the second largest donor. Germany, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and Canada rank next in line.  Several of the same countries—the United States, Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom—top the list for donations to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees; and financial support to meet the Ebola crisis in 2015 brought out a similar group of supporters: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan and Canada. While the United States and China have received credit for their leadership on climate change, neither breaks into the top twenty for actual performance, ranking 34th and 47th respectively in Germanwatch’s Climate Change Performance Index. Instead, look to the United Kingdom and Germany among the large economies, along with Denmark, Sweden, and Morocco, for true leadership on the issue. Finally, there is the issue of will. What country is ready to succeed the United States? China was quick off the starting block. At the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of political and economic elites in Davos this past January, Chinese president Xi Jinping used his star turn to assert Beijing’s desire to wear the crown. Yet China is a mere pretender to the throne, demonstrating none of the qualities necessary to support, much less lead, a globalized world. Justin Trudeau, in contrast, replied to President Trump’s ban on Muslim refugees by welcoming the refugees to Canada, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has long kept the door open to refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East. The reality may well be that there is no one, individual country that can replace the United States. Instead, an informal alliance of countries may need to step up to the plate. Germany, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom all emerge as important pillars of a globalized world, with different combinations playing a central role on different issues.  And in some cases, smaller countries may become the true leaders. After President Trump announced a ban on American funding for overseas non-governmental organizations that provide abortion services, for example, the Netherlands emerged to rally a group of twenty-odd countries to begin to fill the $600 million funding gap. Many Americans will undoubtedly despair that the United States is no longer the essential power. What really matters, however, is that the values and institutions that the United States helped create and sustain for more that seventy years are strong enough to withstand the loss of its leadership.

Rachel Brown, Sherry Cho, Lorand Laskai, Gabriella Meltzer, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. China’s aircraft carrier sails through Taiwan Strait. Early Wednesday morning, China’s sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailed into the Taiwan Strait, leading Taipei to scramble F-16 fighter jets and ships to “surveil and control” the movement of the Liaoning and its accompanying five warships. The carrier ship group was returning to Qingdao after training exercises in the South China Sea, and did not technically veer into Taiwanese waters during its ten-hour journey through the Taiwan Strait. This new military posturing by China comes at a delicate time in cross-strait relations. On her way to a diplomatic visit in Central America, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen recently met with prominent U.S. politicians such as Senator Ted Cruz in a visit that, unsurprisingly, met with Chinese censure. Tsai’s Central America visit was itself intended to shore up support from Taiwan’s dwindling number of diplomatic allies after São Tomé and Príncipe’s recent diplomatic recognition of China, which left Taiwan with just twenty-one diplomatic allies. Since last May, when Tsai refused to acknowledge the 1992 Consensus in her inauguration speech, relations between China and Taiwan have deteriorated. China views the consensus, a tacit agreement that there is only one China, with each side having its own interpretation, as crucial to ensuring stable cross-strait ties. An unprecedented phone call between Tsai and U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump last month injected further uncertainty into China-Taiwan relations. And while Beijing may continue to claim that its recent maneuvers are normal training exercises, China’s most recent round of military exercises in the disputed South China Sea continues to sustain tensions with its Pacific neighbors in a theater already full of fraught enmities and uneasy allies. 2. Philippines to expand birth control access. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte authorized his government to increase contraception availability for approximately 6 million women currently lacking access. The government’s first priority will be assisting 2 million women living in poverty over the next year by partnering with civil society organizations. Birth control is already available in the Philippines, but it is often prohibitively expensive, making it accessible only to middle- and high-income individuals. Family planning poses a conundrum for the Philippines, which is 81 percent Catholic and the only Asian country to experience a rise in the rate of teen pregnancies over the past twenty years. In 2008, 54 percent of pregnancies were unintended, most of which occurred among poor women. Abortion is illegal in all circumstances. While the Philippines passed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act in 2012, which would have provided nationwide birth control access, it has been stalled by a temporary restraining order from the Supreme Court. The order stopped issuance of implanted birth control devices, and budgets for birth control provision have been cut independent of the court’s ruling. Duterte’s latest move to promote contraception access will likely anger the Catholic Church as well. 3. $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund takes shape. Last October, Japanese telecommunications multinational Softbank made headlines by announcing a plan to create a $100 billion fund to invest in new technologies—the largest such fund in history. Now, with a number of investors and leaders in place, the fund is beginning to take shape. So far, investments have come from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund ($45 billion) and SoftBank itself ($25 billion), along with Qualcomm, Apple, and others. The sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi may soon join as well. In addition to SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, many of the fund’s leaders are Wall Street veterans, including the fund’s head Rajeev Misra who formerly worked at Deutsche Bank. The Vision Fund is expected to invest in a range of new technologies including robotics, artificial intelligence, and the “Internet of Things,” and will likely make investments in larger companies as well as start-ups. With the fund, Son will endeavor to build off previous technology investment successes including deals with Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Some have speculated, however, that the fund may also serve as a way for SoftBank to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration by investing large sums in the United States. 4. China offers to remove compulsory IUDs. For more than thirty years, the Chinese government has required many women be fitted with an intrauterine device (IUD) in order to comply with the country’s controversial one-child policy. But now with the country’s birth rate declining, the government has replaced the one-child policy with a “two-child” policy and is offering women that were forced to receive an IUD a free surgery to remove the device. But many women are not accepting that gesture graciously: after years of being subjected to forced family planning, the government’s about-face without an apology has left many women indignant. Since the inception of the one-child policy, over 300 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs and more than 100 million underwent tubal ligations. The enforcement of the one-child policy, which Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan portrays in Frog, a novel about the most intense years of forced sterilization and abortion in a fictional village, has had a brutal history. Over three decades later, its victims’ scars have not yet healed. 5. Australia and East Timor tear up maritime agreement. On Monday, Australia and East Timor, a nation of just over a million citizens that became a sovereign state in 2002, agreed to terminate a decade-old treaty in favor of negotiating a new maritime boundary. Under the 2006 treaty, the two countries agreed to suspend boundary talks for fifty years and split the tax revenues of the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field equally—a tract closer to East Timor’s coast with up to $40 billion in hydrocarbons. Now, according to a joint statement, the governments have committed to negotiate a new maritime boundary under the auspices of The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration. But this time around, East Timor will likely demand a boundary line equidistant between the two countries and, as a result, a greater share of the oil and gas revenues from the region. For East Timor, the revenues are practically a matter of life and death: without new sources of income, some predict that the fledgling nation could be bankrupt within a decade. Bonus: Benefits of China’s “anti-smog” teas debunked. Chinese citizens in Beijing are finally finding relief after a period of dangerous smog that forced a red alert for twenty-three cities throughout northern China and shut down schools, construction sites, and factories. The smog extended 3.9 million square miles, which is roughly the area of the continental United States. In an effort to protect themselves from pollution levels ten times greater than those advised by World Health Organization guidelines, many Chinese have turned to “anti-smog” teas, sold widely in medicine shops, pharmacies, and online for about $2.90 per pack. Listings claim that the tea’s combination of traditional Chinese herbs, including dried chrysanthemum and honeysuckle, can boost overall health and remove smog-induced impurities from the body. However, a recent state report on CCTV featuring Liu Quanqing, president of the Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, attacked these claims as false, saying that the “digestive and respiratory systems are separate” and that many of these teas contain ingredients that in fact can cause “health problems if taken for a long time.” China’s Centers for Disease Control instead recommends face masks and air purifiers to combat smog.

This fall, I created and taught a course at Georgetown University called “Clean Energy Innovation." The course, offered to undergraduates studying Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) in the School of Foreign Service (SFS), introduced the science, economics, and public policies related to breakthrough technologies that could jumpstart the U.S. economy and are the world’s best hope to confront climate change. Now that the semester is over, all of the lecture videos are freely available online on the course website. You can also view the slides used in each lecture as well as the syllabus, which lists a collection of essential articles and book chapters. The course doesn’t have prerequisites (though there is a bit of math!), and I created it in order to offer a one-stop offering for anyone who is interested in understanding the range of topics that clean energy innovation encompasses. For more on those topics, check out the video below, which is an introduction to and overview of the class: We started the semester by examining technological change over the centuries—studying the shifts from waterwheels to power plants, coaches to cars, floppy disks to USB sticks—to understand how innovation unfolds and why it’s particularly difficult in the ossified energy sector. We then delved into the scientific foundations and research frontiers of several major clean energy technology categories in the electric power sector: solar; wind; nuclear; batteries; fuel cells; carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration; hydro; geothermal; and the power grid. Finally, we concluded with a look at how to fund energy innovation, why start-ups can languish in the valley of death, and how federal and local governments can provide an “extended pipeline” of support for research, development, demonstration, and deployment of new technologies. But it is private investors and firms that must ultimately supply most of the investment to commercialize breakthroughs, so the course focuses on the role of the private sector in innovation. Interspersed with the lecture videos, you’ll find Georgetown students presenting the assigned readings—crisply, comprehensively, and creatively. These students blew me away by building on the basics introduced in class and developing new research directions. One student wrote an article for the Brookings Institution arguing that “investment in lithium-ion batteries may crowd out future innovation.” Another’s term paper statistically analyzed various success metrics for the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to propose funding a coherent, multigenerational portfolio of clean energy technologies, similarly to how the Defense Department’s DARPA operates. So if you’re curious about clean energy innovation, take this class. And I’m eager to hear your feedback on how I can improve it for future editions. I’m grateful to Joanna Lewis, Chuck Weiss, and Mark Giordano at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, as well as Varun Rai at UT Austin, for guidance in creating this course. I’m also indebted to Chuck Weiss, Bill Bonvillian, Colin McCormick, and Dan Stout for delivering phenomenal guest lectures this semester. Watch their lectures on the course website at sivaram.georgetown.domains.  

Democrats and Republicans are girding for battle over energy policy. The two parties are far apart on most issues, like the future of the Clean Power Plan and federal restrictions on oil and gas drilling. But with the Presidential election in the rearview mirror, Donald Trump and the 115th Congress have a chance to embrace a mainstream energy agenda with support from both sides of the aisle and deliver on campaign promises to create manufacturing jobs and boost exports. Innovation is central to this agenda. Today the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a report that I wrote with my colleagues Teryn Norris, Colin McCormick, and David Hart, laying out a blueprint for how to accelerate energy innovation. We believe this is a perspective that will resonate with the new administration. In fact, President-elect Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, has forcefully made the case for why energy innovation “will be vital in the decades ahead.” And former Texas Governor Rick Perry, tapped as Secretary of Energy, has remarked, “Energy innovation, it’s the quickest way to make our anemic economy very powerful.” This thesis has broad support among leaders in the private sector. Just yesterday, a group of wealthy investors led by Bill Gates unveiled Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund in excess of $1 billion to invest in early-stage clean energy technology companies. But it will take enabling public policies to unleash private sector investment in energy innovation. In our report, we urge the federal government to: Reform a sprawling set of institutions to increase the commercial impact of federal energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) and maximize taxpayer return on investment. These reforms should draw inspiration from experiences in other sectors, including life sciences, semiconductors, electronics, and agriculture, where breakthrough technologies have been successfully commercialized. We distill these lessons into five principles for institutional change that should be applied to key federal agencies, especially the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE): 1. Connect basic science with technology priorities; 2. Reorient the national labs to pursue commercially relevant RD&D; 3. Encourage more private investment in energy innovation; 4. Support demonstration projects; and 5. Complement “supply-push” policies with “demand-pull” policies. These reforms will help focus federal energy-innovation resources on urgent and coherent needs. We put forward six candidates for these “Technology Missions”: 1. Nuclear power; 2. Solar energy; 3. Energy storage; 4. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage; 5. Advanced cooling and thermal energy storage; and 6. Smart energy management and connected vehicles. To fund all of this, we recommend that the United States double its funding for energy RD&D, consistent with the Mission Innovation commitment that it and nineteen other major economies have made. Leading lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed their support for boosting scientific research, so expanding doubling the budget for energy innovation to roughly $13 billion—a rounding error in the federal budget—is politically tractable. And we also offer avenues to supplement Congressional appropriations, for example by restructuring the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In promoting energy innovation, we argue that “President-elect Trump has an opportunity to make good on his campaign promises to create well-paid advanced-manufacturing jobs, protect the environment, embrace a diverse energy mix that includes fossil fuels, and boost the flagging U.S. trade balance.” His administration and the next Congress should seize it. Read the full ITIF report here.

The Institute of Race Relations’ (IRR) Centre for Risk Analysis has published a study that shows the dramatic increase in mobile phone usage in South Africa and its importance as a portal to internet usage. During the 2000-2014 period, fixed line subscriptions per one hundred people dropped by 38 percent while mobile phone subscriptions increased by 702 percent. The increase affected all races, but the growth is especially striking among ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ South Africans. For Black South Africans it was 405.3 percent; for ‘Coloureds’ it was 763.6 percent; for ‘Indians’ it was 708.3 percent; for Whites it was 470.6 percent. The lower rate of increase among Blacks may reflect the higher levels of poverty among that demographic. Among whites, the lower level may reflect that many of them have long had access to land lines and to cell phones, resulting in a lower rate of usage growth. The IIR predicts that mobile phones will accelerate a shift toward online retail. It also suggests a growth in social media’s influence on politics. The IRR report shows that the South African cell phone market is dominated by three companies: Cell C with a market share of 25.1 percent; MTN, with 33.2 percent; and, Vodacom, with 38.5 percent. All three are South Africa based. Cell C has an important Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) dimension, a government-sponsored program to provide access for blacks to the modern economy; it also has a focus on providing low-cost service. British investors have a large stake in Vodacom. MTN, headquartered in Johannesburg, has world-wide operations. Telecommunications is an important part of the ‘new’ South African economy, even while the ‘old’ economy based on mining continues to decline.

This post is co-authored by Becky Allen, a research associate in the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Nigeria has been identified as one of eleven emerging economies with high growth potential for the coming decades. And yet, Nigeria is far from achieving the World Bank’s goal of universal financial access by 2020, with women comprising the majority of Nigeria’s “unbanked.” Only one-third of Nigerian women own a bank account, compared with more than half of Nigerian men, a stubborn gender gap that has grown, not shrunk, in recent years, from 7 percent in 2011 to 21 percent in 2014. Factors preventing women from opening bank accounts in emerging economies – such as Nigeria – include the inability to travel to bank branches, limited financial literacy, and inadequate proof of identification. Ironically, however, evidence suggests that women default less frequently on loans and invest more in their families compared to their male counterparts. In an effort to reverse the growing gender gap among Nigeria’s unbanked, the private and public sectors have begun to harness digital technology to overcome the barriers preventing Nigerian women from opening bank accounts. One such innovative financing tool is the digital BETA savings account. Launched by Diamond Bank in partnership with Women’s World Banking in 2013, BETA savings accounts relieve customers of needing to go to a physical bank branch to open and operate an account. Rather, “BETA Friends” – female bank agents – attend open-air markets with mobile devices, enabling women to setup accounts and make deposits and withdrawals without having to leave their stalls. Significantly, women can open BETA savings accounts without documentation or minimum balance requirements thanks to Nigeria’s tiered Know Your Customer Requirements (KYC), which enables Diamond Bank to open low-value accounts with basic personal information. Since its launch, BETA has reached more than 275, 000 clients. Following the success of BETA, Diamond Bank launched BETA Target Savers Accounts – another innovative digital product designed to increase women’s financial inclusion. These accounts enable women to save for specific goals, such as financing child birth or a child’s education, likewise employing BETA Friends to facilitate the process for women. Diamond Bank also permits women to take out loans without having to provide collateral through the BETA Kwik Loan, a service that operates via BETA technology. Earlier this year, yet another mobile money platform launched to enable women in rural Nigeria to transfer money to one another. This product, the result of a partnership between the nonprofit financial platform Stellar and the fintech service provider Oradian, aims to replace less secure cash transfers (often conducted by a third party individual traveling from one area to another) with mobile money transfers. Most recently, UN Women partnered with the Zamani Foundation, MasterCard, and the National Identity Management Commission to launch the “One Woman, One ID Card” initiative in Nigeria. The project seeks to reduce the number of women without a form of personal identification and to provide women with finance and business training. Within the project’s pilot phase in Kaduna State, five thousand women are expected to benefit, and in total, the initiative is expected to impact 500,000 Nigerian women. According to UN Women representative Adjaratou Ndiaye, 70 percent of Nigerians living below the poverty line – the majority of whom are women – could benefit from increased financial inclusion in the country. Perhaps with the onset of these new technologies targeted at women, Nigeria can narrow, or even close, its banking gap and achieve the 2020 goal of universal financial access.

Rachel Brown, Sherry Cho, Gabriella Meltzer, and Gabriel Walker look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. Asia braces for Trump. On Tuesday night, as results from the U.S. general election poured in from polling places across America, Asian markets reeled at the prospect of a Trump presidency. By Thursday, U.S. markets stabilized and Asian markets had bounced back. But what will a Trump in the White House mean for Asia in the coming four years? At this point, even experts’ best guesses are still uncertain. Trump’s foreign policy strategies are a contradictory bunch: an isolationist “America first” doctrine and protectionist trade practices, but an “extremely tough” approach to taking on U.S. enemies. So far, the signals from Trump’s campaign have been just as mixed. On “day one,” according to a former U.S. Treasury official, Trump may label China a currency manipulator, a decision former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called “ludicrous.” But at the same time, Trump spoke with both South Korea’s President Park and Japan’s Prime Minister Abe in a sign of reassurance from the United States to its allies in Asia. This week, two senior Trump advisors on Asia also published a Foreign Policy piece that put forth a vision of “peace through strength” whose policy prescriptions primarily attacked “bad trade deals” and proposed to increase the size of the U.S. Navy fleet. What will actually come to pass is anyone’s guess. 2. Delhi enveloped in life-threatening smog.  Hindus throughout the city of Delhi celebrated the holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights, on Saturday by lighting candles and lamps and setting off fireworks. Unfortunately, these joyful rituals exacerbated the metropolis’s preexisting pollution problem, sparking a week-long period of dangerous smog. The situation has forced the municipal government to close 1,800 schools, as well as impose a five-day moratorium on construction and a ten-day power plant closure; it is also advising residents to remain indoors. Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday to protest, as current levels of particulates are as dangerous as smoking two packs of cigarettes per day and 10 percent of the city’s workforce has been forced to call in sick. According to the World Health Organization, India currently houses thirteen out of the twenty most polluted cities on earth, with Delhi carrying the title of most polluted. Although changing weather conditions with the arrival of winter will dissipate the smog, poor city-dwellers often turn to the burning of trash, plastic, and rubber to keep warm. In addition, the various sources of pollution, including crop burning, vehicles, construction, and fireworks, all fall under the purview of different government agencies, which are oftentimes at odds with one another. Arvind Kejriwal, New Delhi’s chief minister has compared the city to a “gas chamber,” and has said that the government needs to take “some urgent measures.” 3. President Park asks opposition parliament to nominate new prime minister. The recent announcement was a major political concession for South Korean President Park Geun-hye and fresh confirmation of her waning political authority as the scandal involving her ties to Choi Soon-shil continues to roil the country. Despite Park’s efforts to regain public trust by replacing much of her presidential staff and cabinet, surveys show that Park has a less than 5 percent approval rating. Tens of thousands of protestors continue to call for her resignation in demonstrations throughout South Korea. In a Tuesday meeting with the National Assembly’s speaker, Chung Sye-kyun, Park asked opposition parties to nominate a new prime minister. This occurred six days after Park’s proposed candidate for prime minister, Kim Byung-joon, was summarily rejected by the opposition parties that control a majority of the South Korean parliament. Investigations into Choi Soon-shil, the centerpiece of this political scandal, continue. Park has offered to cooperate with any prosecutorial probes, possibly becoming the first South Korean president to be investigated while in office. Prosecutors reported on Tuesday that they had raided the Seoul offices of Samsung, South Korea’s largest chaebol, a kind of large business conglomerate, investigating allegations that the chaebol provided $3.1 million to a company co-owned by Choi and her daughter. Choi was arrested on November 3 and faces allegations of using her friendship with the president to act as a kind of “shadow president” and solicit donations. 4. Cambodia’s Hun Sen using courts as a weapon against opposition. The deputy leader of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), Kem Sokha, is the most recent target of a government that rights groups allege is using Cambodian courts as a willful weapon to suppress critics. Kem’s case is one of several facing opposition leaders in what is generally interpreted as an effort to upset the opposition’s organizing efforts for the local elections being held next June. Um Sam Ann, another opposition leader, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for criticizing the government’s handling of the Cambodia-Vietnam border demarcation. CNRP leader Sam Rainsy, currently in self-imposed overseas exile for the third time in a decade, is also facing legal troubles after an old conviction for defamation was reinstated and his parliamentary immunity was stripped by the government’s legislative majority. Although Cambodia is nominally a democracy, Hun has been Cambodia’s de facto leader for three decades. A 2013 general election, however, saw the CNRP mount a strong challenge to Hun’s control, winning fifty-five seats in the National Assembly and leaving Hun’s Cambodian People’s Party with sixty-eight. Many critics allege that Hun has prioritized the dismantlement of the political opposition since then, using complicit courts as a weapon against them. 5. India Bans 500 and 1,000 Rupee Notes.  In a surprise announcement, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned the use of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes in an effort to crack down on corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion. These two high denomination bills comprise an estimated 85 percent of the currency currently in use in the country. By requiring individuals to change over their bills, officials hope to bring to light billions of dollars of assets that are not currently reported. But while there may be long-run benefits in improved tax collection and financial transparency, the immediate effect was a stock market drop. The change also led to a two-day ATM shutdown and to chaos at banks where customers attempted to switch their bills for new 500 and 2,000 rupees with added security features. The introduction of a new 1,000 rupee note is also underway. The transition has been particularly felt in cash-dependent rural areas, but will also have implications for everyone from nonresident Indian nationals to foreign visitors. Bonus: Japanese augmented reality will hack your taste buds. At the University of Tokyo’s Cyber Interface Lab, researchers are using augmented reality—a combination of virtual reality and real-world objects—to trick how our brains process eating. Various headsets, detailed in this this video, can digitally manipulate the perceived size of a food item to affect how satiated a wearer feels while eating, or pump scents toward an eater’s nose that can suggest a wide variety of flavors. The effects can potentially reduce calorie intake by making the user believe he or she is eating more, or something different, than in reality. In some experiments, volunteers ate almost 10 percent less when a biscuit appeared 50 percent larger. Some companies, like Samsung, have also begun probing the “culinary virtual reality space” in other ways to offer state-of-the-art—albeit somewhat fictitious—fine dining experiences.