The US and Pacific allies will counter a bid from Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) to build a communications network in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a senior diplomat said yesterday, intensifying a campaign to curb China’s rising regional influence.
Responding to reports that the US and allies Australia and Japan were looking to trump the Chinese firm’s bid to build PNG’s domestic Internet infrastructure, US charge d’affaires in Australia James Caruso was blunt.
“We’re working on a counteroffer,” he told Australian national broadcaster the ABC. “It is up to the PNG government at the end of the day, but ... the whole idea is to give alternatives,” he said.
Huawei was effectively banned from rolling out Australia’s 5G network last month, after Canberra warned of security risks with companies beholden to foreign governments.
Australia this year convinced the Solomon Islands to drop a contract with Huawei to build an underwater Internet cable, with Canberra instead agreeing to help fund the project, which will also connect to PNG.
Huawei has long refuted the accusations of security risks and links to the Chinese state intelligence services.
Beijing has been showering billions of dollars in infrastructure loans to tiny island nations across the Pacific Ocean, a region considered strategically important as a maritime gateway to Asia, including China.
Australia, which has been critical of Beijing’s “soft diplomacy” in the region, has been leading a charge to counter China’s influence, boosting aid to Pacific nations and strengthening regional security pacts.
Caruso said there was a need to make it easier for Pacific nations to do business with the US and its allies, providing a transparent private sector-led model that offered a clear alternative to Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative.
“The whole idea is to give alternatives, not to say ‘don’t do business with China,’” he said. “China’s offers are out on the table, it is up to us to be competitive.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day