Chinese Digital Platform Companies’ Expansion in the Belt and Road Countries

The emergence of digital platforms is shifting the digital economy toward a platform economy, and Chinese platform-based businesses like Alibaba, Tencent, and JD are increasingly expanding in the Global South. Alongside this, the Chinese government has been promoting digital economy collaboration with emerging markets through high-level engagement under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its digital economy component the Digital Silk Road (DSR). Despite significant market interest and policy attention, grounded empirical analysis of Chinese digital platforms’ expansion within Belt and Road Initiative countries is scarce. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, drawing on both quantitative data of Chinese platform companies’ overseas foreign direct investment and qualitative data obtained from fieldwork interviews in Southeast Asia and from secondary sources to conduct a case study of Chinese platforms in Indonesia. It finds that Chinese digital platforms largely undertook their overseas expansion based on commercial interests, and Beijing’s high-level policy framework BRI has had a limited direct impact on the expansion of the privately-owned Chinese platforms and their local business operations within host countries. The vagueness of BRI/DSR has also given platform companies investing in Indonesia room to choose how they engage with Chinese BRI/DSR rhetoric depending on the local context. Furthermore, local contextual factors, including Indonesian policy, policy implementation, and labor market, have shaped the platforms’ business expansion. Firms have been pushed to adapt to local policy priorities and socioeconomic context, seek local partners and invest in local capacity building. The findings suggest a more complicated state-firm relationship in Chinese digital platforms’ expansion than that which is often perceived, and the importance of host country contexts in shaping Chinese digital platforms’ local business strategies

Chinese-Invested Smart City Development in Southeast Asia - How Resilient Are Urban Megaprojects in the Age of Covid-19?

Smart cities are emerging as major engines for deploying intelligent systems to enhance urban development and contribute to the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG). In developing economies facing rapid urbanization and technological change, new cities are being built with smart technologies and ideals, complete with business districts and residential, retail, entertainment, medical, education facilities to entice businesses and talents to relocate. Governments tout the potential of such “greenfield” smart cities for innovation and sustainability. Yet such urban megaprojects are often extremely expensive, prompting governments to partner with private players such as property developers, investors, and tech firms to share the cost, and supply infrastructure and technologies

Governing the Gold Rush into Emerging Markets: A Case Study of Indonesia’s Regulatory Responses to the Expansion of Chinese-Backed Online P2P Lending

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending has the potential to boost financial inclusion in emerging markets. This paper contributes to the literature on fintech governance in emerging Asian markets. It examines the case of the Indonesian government’s approach in regulating the P2P lending sector using both primary interviews and secondary firm-level data. Driven by regulation tightening in China and regulatory gaps in Indonesia, Chinese investments became the largest in this sector contributing, however, to growing risks from illegal business practices. The Indonesian government responded by creating new regulations and institutions, mitigating risks without stifling the potential for financial inclusion. We conclude a proactive approach towards monitoring and regulating emerging high-tech industries should be sought by strengthening links with industry and civil society, and through international cooperation for policy and knowledge sharing

Chinese-backed FinTech Lending Boom: How did Indonesia Respond?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) online lending has the potential to boost innovation and financial inclusion in emerging markets, yet it can also incur investment and borrower-related risks, such as privacy breaches. Driven by regulation control in China, Chinese investments flocked to Indonesia, causing a rapid expansion of online lending platforms. Similar to what happened in China prior to the regulatory crackdown, the P2P lending boom in Indonesia saw a rise in unethical and illegal business practices. The government responded by creating new regulations and institutions to mitigate risks without stifling the potential for financial inclusion. A proactive approach towards monitoring and regulating emerging high-tech industries should be sought by strengthening links with industry and civil society, and through international cooperation for policy and knowledge sharing

ThumbNet: One Thumbnail Image Contains All You Need for Recognition

Although deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in computer vision tasks, its real-world application is still impeded by its voracious demand of computational resources. Current works mostly seek to compress the network by reducing its parameters or parameter-incurred computation, neglecting the influence of the input image on the system complexity. Based on the fact that input images of a CNN contain substantial redundancy, in this paper, we propose a unified framework, dubbed as ThumbNet, to simultaneously accelerate and compress CNN models by enabling them to infer on one thumbnail image. We provide three effective strategies to train ThumbNet. In doing so, ThumbNet learns an inference network that performs equally well on small images as the original-input network on large images. With ThumbNet, not only do we obtain the thumbnail-input inference network that can drastically reduce computation and memory requirements, but also we obtain an image downscaler that can generate thumbnail images for generic classification tasks. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of ThumbNet, and demonstrate that the thumbnail-input inference network learned by ThumbNet can adequately retain the accuracy of the original-input network even when the input images are downscaled 16 times

Electric-field Control of Magnetism with Emergent Topological Hall Effect in SrRuO3 through Proton Evolution

Ionic substitution forms an essential pathway to manipulate the carrier density and crystalline symmetry of materials via ion-lattice-electron coupling, leading to a rich spectrum of electronic states in strongly correlated systems. Using the ferromagnetic metal SrRuO3 as a model system, we demonstrate an efficient and reversible control of both carrier density and crystalline symmetry through the ionic liquid gating induced protonation. The insertion of protons electron-dopes SrRuO3, leading to an exotic ferromagnetic to paramagnetic phase transition along with the increase of proton concentration. Intriguingly, we observe an emergent topological Hall effect at the boundary of the phase transition as the consequence of the newly-established Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction owing to the breaking of inversion symmetry in protonated SrRuO3 with the proton compositional film-depth gradient. We envision that electric-field controlled protonation opens a novel strategy to design material functionalities