UPDATE: Officials and experts said on Friday that the upgraded free-trade agreement between China and Singapore will expand bilateral collaboration in forward-looking areas and provide a boost to global economic recovery.
Tourists from China and Singapore will be able to pay with the e-CNY when travelling to both countries as part of a new pilot programme, in a breakthrough for Beijing’s efforts to promote the cross-border use of the digital yuan.
China is in the midst of rolling out some of the world’s earliest and most detailed regulations governing artificial intelligence (AI). These include measures governing recommendation algorithms—the most omnipresent form of AI deployed on the internet—as well as new rules for synthetically generated images and chatbots in the mold of ChatGPT. China’s emerging AI governance framework will reshape how the technology is built and deployed within China and internationally, impacting both Chinese technology exports and global AI research networks.
The Spanish government has spoken to the U.S. ambassador about its concern regarding the hostile actions, which are not expected between two allies. The discovery that two agents from Spain’s CNI intelligence service were bribed to provide classified information to the United States has led to an unprecedented situation between Madrid and Washington.
A political analyst opined that using English in Indonesia's presidential and vice presidential debate could undermine the quality of democracy and be interpreted as an instrument to underestimate Indonesian language.
China-Singapore FTA upgrade hailed
By Wang Keju
Officials and experts said on Friday that the upgraded free-trade agreement between China and Singapore will expand bilateral collaboration in forward-looking areas and provide a boost to global economic recovery.
The agreement, announced on Thursday by the Ministry of Commerce, will improve market access for businesses to trade and invest in each other's markets.
The signing of the enhanced trade pact, which has been benchmarked against international economic and trade rules and is based on a negative list approach, will lay a more solid foundation for China's accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), they added.
Noting that the improved FTA is part of an ongoing effort since the elevation of bilateral ties in late March, the ministry said that both sides will make further commitments on opening-up to scale up liberalization of trade in services and investment in the form of a negative list, and provide more solid institutional safeguards for companies.
Businesses are able to engage in all other services trade and investment activities and enjoy national treatment, except for restricted or forbidden areas identified in the negative list, the ministry said, stressing that collaboration will be bolstered in emerging sectors such as telecommunication services and the digital economy.
It will enhance the transparency of trade and investment policies and ensure greater certainty in terms of market access, as well as shore up market confidence and foster a more enabling business climate on both sides, said an official with the ministry's international economic and trade relations department.
As a mutually beneficial deal, the upgraded FTA will also help China better align with international standards and further expand institutional opening-up, so as to advance its accession to the CPTPP, said Xu Hongcai, deputy director of the China Association of Policy Science's Economic Policy Committee.
Going forward, China and Singapore will expedite their respective domestic legal steps and strive for the implementation of the upgraded protocol at an early date, the ministry added.
China has been Singapore's top trading partner for 10 consecutive years, and bilateral trade rose 22.8 percent year-on-year to $115.13 billion last year, said the General Administration of Customs.
The renewed framework will usher in more opportunities for Singaporean companies as China has a vibrant consumer market and a booming economy that is rapidly moving toward high-quality growth, said Kok Ping Soon, CEO of the Singapore Business Federation, which represents more than 29,000 Singaporean companies globally.
According to a national business survey released by the federation in January, 46 percent of the companies surveyed currently have a presence in China. Meanwhile, among those planning future overseas expansion, 21 percent expressed their interest in the Chinese market.
Singapore and China should work together to cope with the uncertainties in the global economy and fully leverage new opportunities in areas such as sustainable development and digital innovation, Kok said.
Read more here.
China, Singapore to let each other’s tourists pay with digital yuan
By SCMP
Tourists from China and Singapore will be able to pay with the e-CNY when travelling to both countries as part of a new pilot programme, in a breakthrough for Beijing’s efforts to promote the cross-border use of the digital yuan.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement that its project with the Digital Currency Institute of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) would allow travellers from both countries to use the digital version of the Chinese currency in tourist spending.
Authorities in Singapore said the scheme was expected to “enhance convenience for travellers when making purchases during their overseas travel”, without disclosing further details.
The pilot forms part of a series of initiatives announced by the two governments on Thursday at the annual Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation in China’s northern coastal metropolis Tianjin.
During the event, the two countries also agreed to introduce a mutual 30-day visa-free travel arrangement, one of 24 deals signed to boost bilateral ties.
The new digital-yuan collaboration represents a great opportunity for the cross-border retail use of e-CNY, according to Richard Turrin, independent financial technology consultant and author of Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution.
The use of the digital yuan for small transactions could pave the way for its application in trade and other high-value scenarios, Turrin said.
China started testing its digital currency in 2019. While Beijing has yet to confirm a timetable for the official launch of e-CNY, adoption of the digital yuan has accelerated recently.
Total e-CNY transactions grew to 950 million yuan (US$133 million) in June, reaching a cumulative value of 1.8 trillion yuan compared to 100 billion yuan in August 2022, former PBOC governor Yi Gang said in July this year.
As of last year, 5.6 million merchants across 26 pilot cities had registered to use the digital yuan.
Beijing has also been experimenting with the use of e-CNY outside mainland China, as the internationalisation of yuan becomes more urgent amid rising geopolitical tensions.
China last year completed a multi-country trial named mBridge that used central bank digital currencies to settle trades with Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.
Tests for the cross-border retail use of e-CNY have also been under way in Hong Kong, after Bank of China Hong Kong (BOCHK) in July launched a project allowing mainland customers to shop with the digital yuan in more than 200 retail outlets in the city.
Last year, BOCHK, one of three note-issuing banks in the city, also gave out digital red packets worth 100 e-CNY to customers who set up a digital-yuan wallet through the bank. The electronic money could be used to buy goods at 14 locations of a local supermarket chain.
Read more here.
China’s AI Regulations
By Matt Sheehan
Summary
China is in the midst of rolling out some of the world’s earliest and most detailed regulations governing artificial intelligence (AI). These include measures governing recommendation algorithms—the most omnipresent form of AI deployed on the internet—as well as new rules for synthetically generated images and chatbots in the mold of ChatGPT. China’s emerging AI governance framework will reshape how the technology is built and deployed within China and internationally, impacting both Chinese technology exports and global AI research networks.
But in the West, China’s regulations are often dismissed as irrelevant or seen purely through the lens of a geopolitical competition to write the rules for AI. Instead, these regulations deserve careful study on how they will affect China’s AI trajectory and what they can teach policymakers around the world about regulating the technology. Even if countries fundamentally disagree on the specific content of a regulation, they can still learn from each other when it comes to the underlying structures and technical feasibility of different regulatory approaches.
In this series of three papers, I will attempt to reverse engineer Chinese AI governance. I break down the regulations into their component parts—the terminology, key concepts, and specific requirements—and then trace those components to their roots, revealing how Chinese academics, bureaucrats, and journalists shaped the regulations. In doing so, we have built a conceptual model of how China makes AI governance policy, one that can be used to project the future trajectory of Chinese AI governance (see figure 1).
China’s three most concrete and impactful regulations on algorithms and AI are its 2021 regulation on recommendation algorithms, the 2022 rules for deep synthesis (synthetically generated content), and the 2023 draft rules on generative AI. Information control is a central goal of all three measures, but they also contain many other notable provisions. The rules for recommendation algorithms bar excessive price discrimination and protect the rights of workers subject to algorithmic scheduling. The deep synthesis regulation requires conspicuous labels be placed on synthetically generated content. And the draft generative AI regulation requires both the training data and model outputs to be “true and accurate,” a potentially insurmountable hurdle for AI chatbots to clear. All three regulations require developers to make a filing to China’s algorithm registry, a newly built government repository that gathers information on how algorithms are trained, as well as requiring them to pass a security self-assessment.
Structurally, the regulations hold lessons for policymakers abroad. By rolling out a series of more targeted AI regulations, Chinese regulators are steadily building up their bureaucratic know-how and regulatory capacity. Reusable regulatory tools like the algorithm registry can act as regulatory scaffolding that can ease the construction of each successive regulation, a particularly useful step as China prepares to draft a national AI law in the years ahead.
Examining the roots of these regulations also grants insight into the key intellectual and bureaucratic players shaping Chinese AI governance. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is the clear bureaucratic leader in governance to date, but that position may grow more tenuous as the focus of regulation moves beyond the CAC’s core competency of online content controls. The Ministry of Science and Technology is another key player, one that may see its profile rise due to recent government restructuring and increased focus on regulating underlying AI research. Feeding into this bureaucratic rulemaking are several think tanks and scholars, notably the China Academy for Information Communications Technology and Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI International Governance.
In the years ahead, China will continue rolling out targeted AI regulations and laying the groundwork for a capstone national AI law. Any country, company, or institution that hopes to compete against, cooperate with, or simply understand China’s AI ecosystem must examine these moves closely. The subsequent papers in this series will dig into the details of these regulations and how they came about, deepening understanding of Chinese AI governance to date and giving a preview of what is likely coming around the bend.
Read complete report here.
English Undermines Democracy in Indonesian Presidential Debate
By Petir Garda Bhwana
A political analyst opined that using English in Indonesia's presidential and vice presidential debate could undermine the quality of democracy and be interpreted as an instrument to underestimate Indonesian language.
The proposal for using the foreign language has even shown an absence of comprehending the essence of the debate, Riko Noviantoro, a researcher at the Institute for Development of Policy and Local Partnerships (IDP-LP), stated.
The debate is aimed at helping the public observe the contenders' depth of understanding about the nation's problems and solutions to them instead of showing the pairs' English proficiency, he noted on Friday, December 8, 2023.
According to local media, the idea was recently proposed by Andre Rosiade, a senior politician of Gerindra Party and head of Prabowo-Gibran pair's campaign team for the West Sumatra campaign trail.
Rosiade contended that his proposal for using English language in the debate was reasonable to show the candidates' capability in understanding current geopolitical issues and communicating with world leaders.
According to Noviantoro, the proposal for using English instead of Indonesian as the national language in the General Elections Commission (KPU)-organized debate would also degrade the nation's identity.
The KPU organises the presidential and vice presidential debate for Indonesians and not for foreigners, he stated.
The presidential election will be contested by three pairs of presidential and vice presidential candidates: Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar, Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming Raka, and Ganjar Pranowo-Mahfud MD.
The KPU would hold five rounds of the presidential and vice presidential debate ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election. The first and second rounds will be held on December 12 and Dec. 22, 2023.
Read more here.
Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service
By Miguel González
The Spanish government has spoken to the U.S. ambassador about its concern regarding the hostile actions, which are not expected between two allies. The discovery that two agents from Spain’s CNI intelligence service were bribed to provide classified information to the United States has led to an unprecedented situation between Madrid and Washington.
Spanish Minister of Defense Margarita Robles, who oversees the CNI, summoned the U.S. ambassador to Spain, Julissa Reynoso, to her office to explain what happened. Such actions are considered hostile and are not expected between two allies. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, also spoke with Reynoso and expressed the Spanish government’s unease over the revelations, according to government sources. At least two U.S. agents stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, who were directly involved in recruiting the CNI spies, have been discreetly expelled from Spain.
The investigation into the spying operation began before the summer, when during a CNI security check, it was discovered that the two Spanish agents had accessed classified information that they did not need for their work, nor were authorized to know. The internal investigation confirmed that at least one of the agents, a middle-ranking official at the secret service, had been recruited by U.S. spies to obtain secret information in exchange for a large sum of money. According to sources close to the CNI, the agent was an area chief, one of the sections that are part of the intelligence division, while the other was his assistant.
When the CNI concluded its investigation, the director of the secret service, Esperanza Casteleiro, reported the case to the Prosecutor’s Office of Spain’s highest court, the National Assembly, which transferred the case to the Prosecutor’s Office of the High Court of Madrid, on the grounds that it was the competent authority. The Madrid tribunal then presented the complaint to the investigative courts of Plaza de Castilla.
It was at that moment, according to the sources consulted, that the Spanish government decided to share the findings of the investigation with the United States and condemn what happened. The case is a very serious matter, since recruiting secret agents of a host state to betray their own country is considered an openly hostile act. Such actions may be taken with enemy or adversary governments, but never with friends and allies. Sources from the Spanish intelligence service do not fully understand what happened. “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?” they noted. These sources insist that Spain openly collaborates with the United States, and always exchanges information. According to these sources, the number of times in which Spain has refused to share information of interest to Washington is “between one and zero.”
These sources explain that, when the U.S. Ambassador Reynoso was summoned by Minister Robles, she said that she was not aware of the case. The U.S. ambassador allegedly claimed that the U.S. agents who had bribed the Spanish spies were working independently of her, in a program that was launched before current President Joe Biden arrived at the White House and that, for reasons unknown, had been maintained until now. Reynoso, the same sources add, apologized for what happened and promised utmost collaboration with the ongoing investigation. The case has left the U.S. in an embarrassing situation.
The Spanish Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs agreed to expel at least two American spies — some sources claim that there were more — who were involved in recruiting and bribing the CNI agents. The spies were expelled discreetly, as Washington rushed to remove them. For its part, the Madrid court sealed the investigation, and ordered the arrest of the two alleged CNI spies and for their homes to be searched. Both were taken to the Estremera prison module in Madrid, which is reserved for security forces personnel and prison officials who are serving a sentence or are in pre-trial, and is separated from the rest of the inmates. The CNI assistant was released last month, while his superior remains behind bars.
According to CNI sources, the arrest of the CNI area chief has shocked his colleagues, since he is a veteran agent and widely known in the center. Both he and his subordinate are accused of the crime of revealing secrets and could be sentenced to between six and 12 years in prison under Article 584 of the Penal Code, which punishes “a Spaniard who, with the purpose of helping a foreign power, association or international organization, procures, falsifies, disables or discloses information classified as reserved or secret, that is likely to harm national security or national defense.”
This is not the first time that the Spanish secret service has denounced one of its own agents for spying. In 2007, the CNI opened a case against former spy Roberto Flórez — who had worked for the center between 1992 and 2004 —, after classified documentation was found in his premises and two apartments he owned in Puerto de la Cruz in Tenerife. The CNI also seized a letter addressed to the Russian secret services in which Flórez offered to work for them in exchange for a first payment of $200,000. Although it could not be proven that Flórez had delivered the secret documents, the Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced him to 12 years in prison in 2010, which the Supreme Court later reduced to nine.
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