ASEAN integration, one corridor at a time

Insight: The 6th July Singapore-Indonesia Leaders’ Retreat was more than routine bilateral diplomacy. The 26 deliverables announced in Jakarta point to a practical effort to build the connective infrastructure of an increasingly fragmented and contested regional economy: power trade, carbon cooperation, digital infrastructure, industrial development, supply-chain resilience, defense ties, air connectivity, and trade facilitation. Singapore brings capital, regulatory credibility, connectivity, and corporate networks, while Indonesia brings scale, land, energy resources, and industrial ambition. Together, they are trying to turn proximity into productive capacity, from Batam-Bintan-Karimun’s digital and logistics potential to Kendal’s industrial expansion and future clean-energy links.

Impact: The broader significance is a more functional model of ASEAN integration, where supply chains, power links, data infrastructure, and carbon market arrangements are stitched together before external shocks force the issue. The retreat’s cross-border electricity roadmap could be a template in advancing the ASEAN Power Grid one corridor at a time, while its digital agreements land as ASEAN moves toward the Digital Economy Framework Agreement, which member states have targeted for signing in November. The region is writing the rulebook while both countries lay the commercial infrastructure beneath it. The opportunity is significant, but execution will decide the outcome. With Singapore set to chair ASEAN in 2027, how this corridor performs could shape what regional integration means in practice.

On July 6, China launched a submarine-based ballistic missile from the South China Sea, travelling 7,300 kilometres into the South Pacific. This is the first time Beijing has publicly demonstrated sea-based nuclear strike capability in open international waters. China called it routine annual training; Japan, Australia, and the Philippines called it destabilising.

Insight: South Korea's AI boom is quietly reshaping the country's social order. Soaring global demand for memory chips has propelled Samsung and SK Hynix to record profits, and both companies have now agreed to share a portion of operating profits directly with employees. With both firms expected to earn hundreds of billions of dollars this year, average bonus payouts per memory chip worker could reach around ₩600mn ($400,000) at Samsung, roughly twelve times the national average salary. University admission scores for semiconductor "contract" programs now rival those required for medicine at Seoul National University. The chip industry has, in a generation, vaulted to the top of a prestige hierarchy that doctors and lawyers spent decades building.

Impact: The social consequences are already visible: Matchmaking agencies are now ranking Samsung chip engineers alongside lawyers in their "spousal job index", a telling barometer of status in a society where marriage markets reflect professional hierarchies with unusual precision. More corrosive, say psychologists, is what Koreans call sangdaejeok baktalgam, or "relative deprivation": the particular sting of watching a classmate on the same track suddenly earn far more. Whether the boom endures is another question: chip engineers themselves are wary of the industry's notorious cyclicality, and what the AI wave gives, a down cycle can take away.

Insight: Anthropic has been covertly tracking whether Claude Code users are based in China or affiliated with Chinese AI labs, injecting data on time zones, proxy settings, and lab connections into system prompts without users' knowledge. The feature, confirmed by an Anthropic employee as "an experiment launched in March," was designed to curb account abuse and model distillation — a threat Anthropic previously called out publicly — as it accused several Chinese AI companies of training on Claude outputs at scale. Facing a backlash from Chinese-speaking users on X, Anthropic said the function would be "fully rolled back."

Impact: The incident is a stark reminder that data privacy concerns around AI tools are no longer hypothetical. Anthropic collected and processed personal data without user consent and outside of any disclosed privacy policy. That it was framed internally as “an anti-abuse measure” does not change the legal or ethical calculus: covert profiling by an AI provider is precisely the kind of practice that regulators are moving to prohibit. For organizations deploying AI tools, it sharpens a question that compliance and legal teams are only beginning to ask: what kind of data are these platforms collecting about your people, and under what terms?

In India, where only a small minority speaks English fluently, if not, natively, it’s rather curious that all the books sold at used bookshops, traditional bookstores, and on Amazon’s Top 100 list, are all in the language. Known as one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, English is a language of aspiration, reflected in the self-help titles that continue to top bestseller lists and that non-fiction texts there outsell fiction by a longshot, unlike other large English-language markets.

This thoughtful reflection on The Economist argues that India’s English-language reading habits reflect a nation’s evolving sense of self: shaped by personal ambitions and aspirations — whether through self-improvement, self-discovery, or self-promotion. In a collectivist society, reading has become the socially acceptable vehicle for individual identity.

Read on here.