JAKARTA — Indonesia’s annual economic growth fell slightly, but remained solid at 5.05% last year, as exports contracted amid falling commodity prices, data from the statistics bureau showed on Monday.

That growth rate was close to the government’s latest outlook of 5% and slightly below the 5.3% recorded in 2022, when economic activity was boosted by record exports amid a global commodity boom.

Last year, prices of Indonesia’s main commodities like palm oil, coal, and nickel dropped, while demand from major trade partners also softened amid weakening global growth.

Southeast Asia’s largest economy was also feeling the pinch from the central bank’s rate hikes, totalling 250 basis points between August 2022 and October 2023, which hit domestic consumption.

In the final quarter of 2023, gross domestic product (GDP) grew 5.04% year-on-year, roughly in line with a forecast of 5% predicted by economists polled by Reuters.

The government is targeting 5.3% GDP growth this year, hoping campaign spending for the Feb. 14 presidential and legislative elections will boost domestic demand, with investment also potentially coming in after uncertainty surrounding the transition of power diminishes.

The statistics bureau is due to release the breakdown of GDP data later on Monday. — Reuters

SYDNEY/BEIJING — A Beijing court on Monday handed Australian writer Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence, five years after he was first detained in China and three years after a closed-door trial on espionage charges.

Yang, a pro-democracy blogger, is an Australian citizen born in China who was working in New York before his arrest at Guangzhou airport in 2019. He had been accused of spying for a country China has not publicly identified and the details of the case against him have not been made public.

Sydney based scholar Feng Chongyi said a court on Monday delivered a suspended death sentence that would convert to life imprisonment after two years.

It was a “serious case of injustice”, he said, adding that Yang had denied the charges. He urged the Australian government to seek medical parole for Yang.

Yang’s sentence was confirmed by another human rights lawyer in Beijing who has been following his case.

“He was found guilty of all charges,” the lawyer said, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Australia is “appalled” at the court’s decision and has called in China’s ambassador, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Monday.

Wong said in a statement on Monday the Australian government understood the sentence can be commuted to life imprisonment after two years if the individual does not commit any serious crimes in that period.

“This is harrowing news for Dr Yang, his family and all who have supported him,” she said.

Yang’s family was “shocked and devastated by this news, which comes at the extreme end of worst expectations”, said a family spokesman in Sydney.

Australia had said it was troubled by repeated delays in Yang’s case, and had advocated for his well-being, including access to medical treatment “at the highest levels”.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

A Beijing court heard Yang’s trial in secret in May 2021 and the case against him has never been publicly disclosed. He has denied working as a spy for Australia or the United States.

Yang wrote about Chinese and US politics as a high-profile blogger and also wrote a series of spy novels before his detention.

His two sons, who live in Australia, wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in October on the eve of his visit to Beijing, urging him to seek Yang’s release on medical grounds.

“The verdict casts a shadow over bilateral ties and will for some time, as it acts as a potent reminder of the opacity of the Chinese system and its imperviousness to reasonable foreign complaints,” said Richard McGregor, senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

His supporters have argued Yang should be released on medical parole, and he was told last year he had a 10 cm (4 inch) cyst on his kidney that may require surgery.

Yang was detained as Australia-China ties deteriorated in 2019, and hopes of his release had been raised by the release of Australian broadcaster Cheng Lei shortly before Albanese visited China last year.

James Laurenceson, Director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at University of Technology, Sydney, said that Beijing had said it wanted to move beyond the stabilisation of ties with Australia, but that the sentence would make a thaw harder.

“This decision makes it extremely difficult for the Albanese government to do so in terms of managing the domestic politics. The strong language already used by foreign minister makes plain their disappointment,” he said. — Reuters

BEIJING — When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China’s bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand US sanctions.

The People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.

The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, dominated by US firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by Britain’s Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.

US and UK export controls prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm designs – which produce the highest-performance chips – to clients in China.

But as the US widens restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, the open-source nature of RISC-V has made it part of Beijing’s plan to curb its dependence on Western technology, although the emerging architecture accounts for a fraction of the chip market.

“The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral,” the Shanghai government’s Science and Technology Commission said in a report published in April.

Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many sanctioned by Washington, invested at least $50 million in projects involving RISC-V between 2018 and 2023, according to a Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies.

While the figure is modest, recent RISC-V breakthroughs and applications in China, many with government funding, have raised Beijing’s hopes that the open-source standard could one day threaten the x86-Arm duopoly, according to state media. Intel and AMD did not respond to questions about the matter, while Arm declined to comment.

RISC-V chips made by Chinese firms and research institutes can now power self-driving cars, artificial-intelligence models and data-storage centres, according to two industry figures and the previously unreported documents.

The military science academy did not respond to a request for comment sent via China’s State Council.

GROWING MATURITY

Arm and x86 are closed architectures, meaning they are proprietary and charge users a license fee. Their outlines are thousands of pages long, with complex instructions and numerous incompatible versions that can only be modified by their developers.

RISC-V is free to use and has a simpler outline, often leading to more energy-efficient chips, and users can build atop the framework to suit their needs.

Half of the more than 10 billion RISC-V chips shipped globally by 2022 were made in China, the state-run China Daily reported in August. Bao Yungang, deputy director of China’s Institute of Computing Technology, told a chip conference last June that funding for RISC-V startups in China had reached at least $1.18 billion to that point.

“The RISC-V ecosystem in China is the most mature globally”, a result of the need of government and industry to develop technology that can circumvent US sanctions, said a sales representative from a Beijing-based company that develops RISC-V chips, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Some 1,061 patents involving RISC-V were published in China last year, up from 10 in 2018, Anaqua’s AcclaimIP database shows. While the US saw a similar increase, 2,508 such patents have been published in China, to the US’s 2,018.

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei, neither of which responded to requests for comment, were the fourth- and fifth-largest filers.

Arm is the dominant architecture in China, so RISC-V is a long-term bet to insure Beijing against a scenario in which Arm is forced to not just halt licensing to Huawei, as it did temporarily in 2019, but to all Chinese companies.

While the performance of RISC-V chips lags Arm in complex computing tasks, the gap is closing as RISC-V startups proliferate and more tech companies invest in the open-source standard, said Richard Wawrzyniak, principal analyst at the SHD Group, a market research firm.

‘TRUE RISE TO POWER’

RISC-V technology emerged last decade from labs at the University of California, Berkeley.

A few months after Huawei was blacklisted by the Trump administration in May 2019, RISC-V International, a non-profit foundation that oversees development of the standard, moved its headquarters from Delaware to Switzerland.

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, told Reuters the move was not to “circumvent any legal restriction by any government” but “to ensure continued ecosystem growth of the open standard for years to come”.

Still, the foundation says on its website that the move alleviated uncertainty as there was concern from the RISC-V community “across 2018-2019” related to the geopolitical landscape, without mentioning China.

Reuters reported in October that some US lawmakers were urging the Biden administration to impose export restrictions around RISC-V, a move that Redmond has said would slow the development of new and better chips.

The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security declined to comment.

For China, there has been a geopolitical incentive to invest in the emerging standard.

In 2019, researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China organized a seminar on how RISC-V could help China achieve tech self-sufficiency.

“Everyone agreed…if domestic chip systems want to get rid of the limitations of x86 and ARM architectures and realise a true rise to power, RISC-V will be the biggest opportunity,” says a summary of the seminar published on the university’s website.

Among recent breakthroughs in China, state-owned car maker Dongfeng Motor Corporation last year developed an automotive MCU chip, used to control the electronic systems of a car, using RISC-V.

Dongfeng and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.

MILITARY INTEREST

Universities and research institutes linked to China’s military have also developed and promoted RISC-V in recent years, Reuters’ review found.

The PLA-run National University of Defense Technology was in the top 15 for RISC-V patents filed in China since 2018, according to AcclaimIP, as was Peng Cheng Laboratory, which has partnerships with at least two defence-related institutes.

At an academic conference in November 2022, researchers at Beihang University, whose scientists are involved in the development of Chinese military aircraft and missiles, presented the design for a RISC-V chip that processes radar signals.

The year prior, researchers at the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a state think tank, co-developed a RISC-V chip to prevent a type of cyberattack. The institute is a PLA supplier, government tenders show.

In May 2023, the CAS Institute of Computing Technology, which is under US sanctions, unveiled the second generation of “Xiangshan”, a RISC-V high-performance PC chip, and “Aolai”, a RISC-V operating system.

Interest from the Chinese institutes and universities, which did not respond to queries, echoes investment in RISC-V research labs and companies a decade ago by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

An agency spokesperson said that while it did not directly fund the development of the RISC-V architecture, it funded efforts that used RISC-V to “create prototype chips and test research hypotheses in the interests of U.S. national security”.

Despite its promise, RISC-V so far has not broken x86 and Arm’s dominance. The SHD Group estimated that 1.9% of all system-on-a-chip units shipped in 2022 had a RISC-V processor.

But with demand for AI chips growing, RISC-V’s low cost, ease of customisation and energy efficiency have made it attractive to some chipmakers.

Original equipment manufacturers “want to develop highly customized cores. And RISC-V really fits that bill,” Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of product management, said in an interview published on the company’s website in September. — Reuters

WASHINGTON — The US Senate on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan border security bill that would also provide aid to Ukraine and Israel following months of negotiations, but the measure faces an uncertain future amid opposition by Donald Trump and hardline Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would take steps to hold an initial vote on the bill on Wednesday. If the bill were to become law, it would mark the most significant changes in US immigration and border security in decades.

Independent US Senator Kyrsten Sinema told reporters the legislation would secure the US southern border, including by requiring the Department of Homeland Security to “shut down” the frontier to migrants if there are an average of more than 5,000 crossing attempts per day over seven days.

In addition to $20.23 billion for border security, the bill included $60.06 billion to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, $14.1 billion in security assistance for Israel, $2.44 billion to US Central Command and the conflict in the Red Sea, and $4.83 billion to support US partners in the Indo-Pacific facing aggression from China, according to figures from US Senator Patty Murray.

An additional $10 billion would provide humanitarian assistance for civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine.

The US would provide $4.83 billion to support key regional partners in the Indo-Pacific where tensions have risen between Taiwan and China, as well as $2.33 billion for Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s invasion and other refugees fleeing persecution.

“The priorities in this bill are too important to ignore and too vital to allow politics to get in the way,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “The United States and our allies are facing multiple, complex and, in places, coordinated challenges from adversaries who seek to disrupt democracy and expand authoritarian influence around the globe.”

The key overseas security provisions of the bill largely match what President Joe Biden requested from Congress in October, when he asked for additional funds for aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

That request was stalled by House Republicans’ insistence that it be tied to a shift in immigration policy.

“I urge Congress to come together and swiftly pass this bipartisan agreement,” Mr. Biden said, also praising the migration measures in the bill.

Senator Schumer said the agreement would provide more frontline personnel and asylum officers and provide “faster and fair” immigration decisions.

Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, has supported the negotiations, saying Republicans would not get a better deal under a Republican White House.

“The Senate must carefully consider the opportunity in front of us and prepare to act,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement.

Mr. Schumer said in a news conference that he had never worked so closely with long-term Senate colleague Mr. McConnell as on the bill.

“At many occasions we thought the negotiations had fallen apart,” Mr. Schumer said.

Other congressional Republicans have said Mr. Biden can enact many of the changes they want to immigration policy through executive action, though they had previously called for legislative action.

Immigration is the second largest concern for Americans, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday and is a top issue for Republicans specifically. The US Border Patrol arrested about 2 million migrants at the border in fiscal year 2023.

Mr. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Biden in the November election, has campaigned heavily on opposition to immigration. House Republicans are also pushing ahead with an effort to impeach President Biden’s top border official, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. — Reuters