A Glacier Collapse Sent a ‘Himalayan Tsunami’ Down the Bhote Koshi
An ice avalanche dammed a border river before nine on August 26, then let go. Hundreds were reported dead or missing as the disaster unfolded.
Japan's ¥370 Trillion Strategy Meets a Shrinking Workforce
Britain's Pacific Climate-Finance Strategy Relies on Access, Not Scale
The Shipping Routes That Built Modern Asia
Editor's Picks
China's Long March-10B Recovery Reveals a Different Reusable-Rocket Model
As Fuel and Food Bills Squeeze the Region, the ADB Rewires Its Crisis Toolkit
The Ambassador Who Won't Read From the Script: Michelle Yeoh's Decade at the UN
BYD Decided to Build Where It Sells. Southeast Asia Said Yes.
The region is integrating economically while fragmenting strategically.
Meridian tracks the forces pulling the Asia-Pacific together—and pushing it apart.
Know Asia Pacific
Inside Fiji's New Mutual-Defence Pact with Australia
The Ocean of Peace Alliance binds Fiji and Australia to respond to threats in the Pacific while leaving Suva's wider partnerships intact.
Uzbekistan Is Building a Patch of English Law in the Middle of Tashkent
Zero tax for fifty years and disputes settled by foreign judges under English common law. The catch is the country the enclave sits inside.
Why Resource-Rich Papua New Guinea Returned to the IMF
A new $216 million staff-level agreement highlights the fiscal and institutional constraints that commodity exports have not resolved.
Kazakhstan's New Constitution Gives Tokayev Another Run
A court ruling preserves the single-term limit but excludes Tokayev's current presidency from the count.
The China Pact Matthew Wale Promised to Review Remains Secret
Matthew Wale once called the 2022 deal with Beijing a threat to his own country. As prime minister, he says a secrecy clause bars him from making it public.
Record Chip Exports, Falling Shares and Korea's Concentration Risk
The government wants investment across 17 strategic sectors through 2040 as demographic decline narrows the workforce available to deliver it.
Chinese EV Investment Is Reshaping Thailand's Auto Industry
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix make up more than 40 percent of the Kospi, exposing the wider market to the memory-chip cycle.
The Limits of Singapore Relocation for Chinese AI Companies
Cheap Chinese EVs now hold over 70 percent of the market. The 'Detroit of Asia' warns the sector could fall off a cliff in 2027.
AI Is Coming for the Business Model That Made India a Technology Power
Singapore offers access to global capital and technology, but a blocked $2 billion transaction shows that relocation does not remove Beijing's influence.
Why Japan Had to Put the Central Bank's Independence in a Footnote
India's IT giants sell billable hours and a pyramid of junior engineers. Generative AI compresses both, and the market has wiped out nearly half the sector's value.
$350 Billion Abroad: Financing South Korea's US Investment Pledge
A single phrase in the government's economic blueprint spooked the bond market into a 30-year high. The fix was fine print.
Thailand Wants Better Tourists, Not Just More of Them
A special law, a state-run corporation, and a 20-year clock. The pledge buys lower tariffs, and raises the question of whether Seoul is exporting its own industrial base.
What Happens to Singapore if the AI Boom Breaks?
The country famous for letting visitors linger is halving visa-free stays and shrinking visa-on-arrival to four countries—just as tourism numbers soften.
India's Growth Has Not Reversed Its Foreign-Investment Slump
Its growth, its state investor, and its property and power markets all lean on AI at once. Now the central bank's own survey has named the bubble as a risk.
The $576 Billion Bet on a Rice-Farming Province: Inside Korea's Gwangju Chip Gambit
Net foreign investment fell to $7.7 billion in the year to March, well below the flows received by Vietnam and Indonesia.
Twenty-Eight Nanometers, Eleven Billion Dollars: India's Bet on Chips Nobody Else Wants to Make
Samsung and SK Hynix are building four fabs in the region with the country's weakest chip-supplier base, government data shows.
Twenty Olympic Pools a Day: Malaysia's AI Boom Runs Into Johor's Water Table
Tata and ASML are betting on chip nodes a decade behind the frontier—deliberately, not as a compromise.
How Rich Is the Asia-Pacific? It Depends Which Number You Trust.
Data centers now draw nearly 200 times more water than ordinary industrial users.
The Development Partners
Australia Wants to Build the Pacific's Infrastructure. The Question Is on What Terms
Canberra has raised its Pacific infrastructure facility to A$4.55 billion, most of it in loans. The projects are real, so is the strategic contest underneath.
Canada's Indo-Pacific Strategy Moves Beyond Security Spending
Three years in, Ottawa has money on the table for climate, nature and trade. The open question is whether a distant middle power keeps showing up.
Norwegian Offshore-Wind Expertise Finds a Market in the Philippines
The UK is placing climate-finance advisers inside Pacific governments to unlock larger global funds, while cutting its own aid budget at the same time.
Denmark Is Exporting Green-Energy Governance to Asia
Ten Norwegian firms offered North Sea know-how for a Philippine offshore-wind sector that barely exists yet. The expertise is genuine; so is the market it opens.
Who Maintains the Risk Map After Swiss Advisers Leave?
Through energy partnerships with Vietnam and Indonesia, Copenhagen transfers the planning systems that greened its own grid, and clears a runway for Danish firms.
What Happens When a Donor Leaves? Sweden Is About to Show Asia
Swiss agencies are building hazard data in Laos and Indonesia and helping Himalayan communities plan. The recurring question in this kind of aid is maintenance.
Finland's Aid to Asia Is Small in Money and Long in Expertise
Once an aid superpower, Sweden is cutting its budget and reweighting toward trade. The interesting question is not why it is leaving, but what it leaves behind.
Germany Is Trying to Make Nature Pay for Itself. Most of It Still Doesn't
Rather than write large checks, Finland pairs its state weather, geology and environment agencies with their Asian counterparts—a model built on institutions.
The Bank That Would Rather Back the Loan Than Make It
Berlin has built funds to draw private capital into conservation. The gap is blunt: far more protected areas need grants than there are projects an investor will touch.
The Middle East
Why Gulf Sovereign Wealth Is Betting on India Again
Gulf funds put $1.7 billion into India in the first half of 2026—the biggest half-year since 2024, and they did it in the middle of a war, not after it.
The Gulf Is Looking East—and This Time It's Permanent
Gulf–ASEAN trade rebounded 14.8 percent and UAE–Emerging Asia commerce hit $268 billion. The pivot east has stopped being a slogan.
Can the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor Finally Become Real?
A route announced at a G20 dinner and buried by war is back—this time pitched as insurance against a single chokepoint, not as ambition.
Can Dubai Remain the Middle East's Commercial Capital?
After the war rattled shipping and nerves, Dubai reached for stimulus to defend the one thing it really sells: being the safe option.
The Gulf's Sovereign Wealth Funds Are No Longer Just Investors
PIF, Mubadala and ADIA once bought trophies. Now they build AI clusters and chase critical minerals—industrial policy in fund clothing.
China, Up Close
13,000 Accounts, 860,000 Messages: Inside China's Alleged Campaign to Shape Taiwan's Local Elections
An alleged influence operation that reached deep into a local election cycle—mapped account by account, message by message.
BYD Decided to Build Where It Sells. Southeast Asia Said Yes.
A Thai plant that hit its ten-thousandth car in four months, and an Indonesian one now expected to employ 18,000. BYD's answer to Western tariffs was to export the factory, not the car.
China's Next Export Might Not Be Factories. It Might Be Cheap Intelligence.
At a Beijing conference this month, the guest list ran from Kazakhstan to Colombia to Chad. Beijing's pitch is shifting from things it builds to computing it rents.
Landlocked Kazakhstan Found Its Ocean on China's East Coast
The first physical project of the Belt and Road wasn't a bridge. It was a container yard in a Chinese port — now one of the busiest overland gateways between Asia and Europe.
Ninety-Two New Ways Out: Read the Map of China's Air-Freight Push
China opened 92 new international air cargo routes in six months. Where they go, and where they don't, says more than the number does.
Before the Network, the Classroom: Huawei's Quieter Play in Africa
The company known for the fights over its 5G gear has trained 1.8 million students, and, along the way, a generation fluent in its systems.
For Fifty Years This Himalayan Road Just Went Through. Now People Stop.
A 1976 supply route over the Hengduan Mountains has become a tourism corridor—with coffee shops at altitude to prove it.
Eighty Tonnes to Caracas: What China Put on the Plane
After two earthquakes killed more than 1,400 people, a Chinese relief flight left Beijing loaded with tents, blankets and water-purification trucks. The manifest is the message.
Hong Kong Wants to Be Asia's Fort Knox: Can 250 Tonnes of Gold Get It There?
A government-owned clearing company is racing toward 2,000 tonnes of vault capacity. Two earlier attempts at this already failed.
Stranded at the Border: How a Himalayan Flood Exposed Nepal's Chinese EV Boom
Seventy customs-cleared Chinese EVs were swept away when the Nepal-China Friendship Bridge flooded — exposing both the scale and the fragility of Nepal's EV boom.
World Cup, Off the Pitch
Where Is the World's Football Really Made?
Pakistan didn't qualify for the 2026 World Cup. Its footballs did—for the fourth tournament running, made by a factory that started with 20 employees and one room.
The Asian Factory Behind Every Goal
More than half of every Nike shoe sold worldwide is now made in Vietnam. A tariff regime built to punish China is landing hardest on the countries that already left it.
The Government Gen Z Elected Faces Its Own 100-Day Test
Singapore's port hit a record 44.66 million containers in 2025—a record set while ships were taking two extra weeks to dodge the Red Sea.
Financing Asia
The $100 Billion Road Across Asia
A highway network meant to link Tokyo to Istanbul is more than 92 percent up to minimum standard. The gap that remains is the part nobody has fixed in thirty years.
A Decade After Its Launch, Has China's AIIB Changed Development Finance?
Washington lobbied allies to stay out of it in 2015. Ten years on, the bank it opposed is the World Bank's largest co-financing partner.
The New Great Game of Development Finance
Japan just put $1.5 billion into an ADB-run fund instead of lending it directly. That decision says more about who finances Asia than any summit communiqué.
How Asia Gets Built: The Development-Finance Series
The Bank That Would Rather Back the Loan Than Make It
IFC bought a bond for a road it didn’t build; ADB is guaranteeing a railway it won’t run. How Asia’s development banks stopped building and started standing behind the money.
Nepal Has the Cheap Power. It’s Missing the Wire.
Hydropower-rich Himalayan states keep being told they’ll become data-center hubs. The electricity is real; the cable to the sea is the problem.
Trust, Not Transmission, Constrains South Asia's Power Grid
South Asia’s grid is gated less by wires than by trust — and, increasingly, by the line between India and China.
The Electric Scooter the Driver Will Never Own
Electric vehicles cost more to buy and less to run — the wrong shape for the drivers who need them. A leasing model, development banks behind it, is rewriting who owns the fleet.
Power & Culture
The Rise of Asia's Strategic Middle Powers
Vietnam's president stood before America's defense secretary and a Chinese delegation and called for competition "bound by law." That line is now closer to a regional doctrine.
From BTS to Semiconductors: How South Korea Turned Pop Culture into Economic Strategy
A Netflix cartoon about a K-pop demon-hunting girl group was streamed 236 million times in weeks. Seoul has spent a decade turning moments like that into an export line.
Beyond Silicon Valley: Asia's Quiet AI Revolution
India named its large language model after the Sanskrit word for "everything." Six other economies built their own. Sovereignty, not scale, is the theme of Asia's AI year.
Profiles
The Two Stocks Holding Up Korea's Market: Inside Samsung's AI Reckoning
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now make up more than half the weight of Korea's entire stock index — a company whose fortunes have become inseparable from its country's.
One Soul, Three Heirs: Inside Reliance's AI Push and Its Long-Awaited Jio IPO
Mukesh Ambani announced Jio would finally file for an IPO and unveiled an Nvidia-powered AI buildout — while confirming the handover to his three children is nearly complete.
The Ambassador Who Won't Read From the Script: Michelle Yeoh's Decade at the UN
Nine years after a Kathmandu earthquake redirected her off-camera life, the actress has become one of the UN's longest-serving Goodwill Ambassadors, and one of the few who keeps showing up after the cameras leave.
Politics
The Government Gen Z Elected Faces Its Own 100-Day Test
Balen Shah went from rapper-engineer to prime minister on a wave of youth anger at corruption. His first 100 days are closing, and the movement that elected him is starting to ask what's actually changed.
The Bill That Fell 54 Votes Short: Inside India's Delimitation Standoff
A Modi government constitutional amendment failed in the Lok Sabha for the first time in 12 years, and the north-south seat fight underneath it is far from over.
Japan's Immigration Fight Moves to the Right of the Government Itself
Sanseito wants to abolish Japan's Immigration Services Agency—outflanking a prime minister already running the hardest immigration line of any postwar Japanese leader.
The Junta's Countdown: Inside Myanmar's 100-Day Gambit
A pardon for 4,000 prisoners, a 100-day ultimatum to rebel armies, and a deadline that almost every serious combatant has already rejected.
Locked Out, Logged In: Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban Meets Reality
Five million accounts deactivated, fines up to A$99 million on the table, and a university study finding most under-16s are on social media anyway.