Asia In Brief Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal last week reported that the admission was made at a December meeting between Chinese officials and Biden administration held in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Chinese delegation reportedly said their nation’s cyberattacks on US infrastructure were linked to America’s support for Taiwan. China believes Taiwan is a rogue province and wants it to reunify with the mainland. The US and many other nations have deep relationships with Taiwan but stop short of completely acknowledging its sovereignty to avoid angering China.

The Journal cited “a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting” as saying the Chinese officials’ remarks “ as describing the Chinese official’s remarks as “indirect and somewhat ambiguous” but also “a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan.”

Suspected China-backed gangs have allegedly infiltrated US telecoms carriers to the extent they can compromise privacy, and built botnets capable of taking down critical infrastructure.

Alibaba Cloud expands outside China, again

Alibaba Cloud last week brought more services out from behind the Great Firewall and into its overseas datacenters.

The company announced its Singapore datacenter now hosts its large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) model Qwen-Max, the reasoning model QwQ-Plus, the visual reasoning model QVQ-Max and the end-to-end multimodal model Qwen2.5-Omni-7b.

China’s top cloud also announced the PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service, an IaaS offering tuned to the needs of distributed inferencing workloads.

SaaS customers outside China were offered the chance to use the company’s “AI Doc” summary-generating tool and the “Smart Studio” generative AI content creation tool that offers text-to-image, image-to-image and text-to-video applications.

India launches new electronics subsidy scheme

India’s government last week launched a new $2.7 billion subsidy scheme aimed at encouraging investment in manufacturing of electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, connectors, speakers, relays, switches, oscillators, sensors, films, and lenses.

India wants that sort of kit to be made locally to support the rest of its growing electronics manufacturing industry, which Bloomberg last week reported now accounts for one in five Apple iPhones.

The newswire claimed contract manufacturers based in India built $22 billion worth of Apple smartphones in the year to March 2025, a 60 percent year-over-year increase.

Philippines authorities shutter mobile carrier

The Philippines National Telecommunications Commission last week effectively shuttered mobile carrier Now Telecom, for reportedly failing to build out a network or use allocated spectrum.

The carrier was also apparently in arrears on fees due to the regulator.

Now Telecom was the nation’s smallest carrier – trailing a rival with 13 million customers. The Philippines allows mobile number portability, and also requires registration of all SIM cards to address spam. ®