SNS: Asia Letter, Q3 2015: Asia On The Move

SNS Subscriber Edition
Volume 18, Issue 23
Week of June 15, 2015
 
In This Issue

Feature: Asia Letter, Q3 2015: Asia On The Move

• Renminbi Top Currency in Asia-Pacific
• Why the TPP Is Important
• Cellular Dynamics
• Free (Tokyo) Electron
• Samsung Invests in South Korea
• About Scott Foster

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Publisher’s Note:  In a week when the president’s own party has turned against his most important geopolitical and economic project, the Trans Pacific Partnership, SNS Asia Editor Scott Foster has done us the terrific service of providing context from the Asian side of the Pacific.

SNS members will find themselves both fascinated and smarter than others at the negotiating table, on issues ranging from stem-cell production techniques and Japanese industrial pivots into medicine to South Korean plans to dominate the chip industry, after reading this week’s Asia Letter.

The ASEAN world is ramping up in a new age of competition in technological development, while China seems to daily hack the top secrets of the US government – and its corporations – and companies around the Pacific Rim find government and cross-industry support for moving forward in new areas, often pioneered by US companies or US universities.

When the pope is smarter about science than the Republican Party, when the president fails to deal honestly with his own party about the potential job loss in a free trade treaty that pits InfoMercantilism against the free-market model, and when the Democrats torpedo their own president’s key project without understanding its role in protecting US jobs from the Chinese, well – it’s time for a complete review of American Principles.  This quarter’s Asia Letter underlines each of these problems.  Maybe it’s time to move beyond anti-science, Twitter, and Facebook. – mra.