Environment

What Happened: Starting in 2025, Indonesia, one of the world’s top receivers of plastic waste, instituted a ban on such imports. The goal is to tackle the environmental impact of the flood of plastic entering the country from abroad, and instead refocus the recycling industry on domestic plastic waste. While environmental campaigners are cautiously optimistic about the ban, they warn that enforcement will be key – and some doubt whether the government is serious about implementation.

Our Focus: There will be several challenges in implementing the ban. First, many plastic waste exports are not properly labeled. “A lot of misdeclared shipments are being sent as ‘plastic pellets’ or other commodity tariff codes instead of being labeled as waste,” Jim Puckett, executive director of the environmental organization Basel Action Network, told The Diplomat. Second, plastic waste also comes into Indonesia in the form of tiny plastic scraps that contaminate other recyclable materials such as paper. Despite a rule limiting any contamination of paper waste to less than 2 percent of the total weight, “we have found contamination levels of up to 30 percent in some imports,” Ecoton’s executive director, Dr. Daru Setyorini, told The Diplomat. In many villages, paper mills offload the plastic scraps to local villagers, who sort through the waste for any usable pieces and burn the rest, resulting in hazardous smoke.

What Comes Next: Thus far, environmental activists have seen little change on the ground, though the plastic import ban supposedly took effect in January. Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Nexus3 Foundation, a Jakarta-based research and advocacy group, said there was no evidence plastic imports had stopped: “They are still coming in.” Even if Indonesia successfully curtails its own imports of plastic waste, it’s likely to simply shift the problem to neighboring Malaysia or farther afield. Indonesia itself saw its plastic waste imports surge after China banned the trade. Ultimately, environmental groups say, only a global approach can solve the issue of plastic pollution. “The solution lies not in shifting the problem elsewhere but in fundamentally changing how the world produces and manages waste,” said Setyorini. “Developed nations must stop using Indonesia as a dumping ground and take real responsibility for their waste.”

INTERVIEW

Russell Hsiao – executive director of Global Taiwan Institute, adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum, and author of “Red Tide: CCP Propaganda and United Front in the 21st Century” – on the two main prongs of China’s influence efforts: “The ultimate objective of the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department (CPD) and the United Front Work Department (UFWD) is to amass ‘discourse power’ and achieve narrative dominance by winning what CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping described as the ‘public opinion struggle.’ Its supporting objectives are two-pronged: One prong is to propagandize Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy positions, and the other is to attenuate and undermine adversarial narratives.”

Northeast Asia

Last week, a PLA naval task force sailed deep into the Southwest Pacific and conducted live-fire drills in the international waters between Australia and New Zealand. The unannounced drills sparked angst in both Pacific countries, though Beijing pointed out that it was in compliance with international law. Around the same time, China also held naval drills in the Gulf of Tonkin and off Taiwan’s southwest coast. Altogether, China is flexing its military muscles and testing the resilience of U.S. partnerships – particularly as the Trump administration is destabilizing U.S.-led security structures.

South Asia

Last weekend marked the five-year anniversary of the Taliban-U.S. deal that paved the way for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Enough time has passed to meaningfully ask whether the deal was worth it – and if so, who benefitted. Certainly the Taliban are the biggest winners, as they now enjoy uncontested rule over all of Afghanistan. Ordinary Afghans, however, have little to celebrate; the war may be over but an economic crisis makes survival a continued struggle. Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan has seen a massive surge in terrorist attacks, an issue that has soured ties with the Taliban.

Southeast Asia

The Thai government is facing the fallout of its deportation of 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China last week. The deported men were part of a larger group of Uyghur Muslims who were detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing oppression in China’s Xinjiang region. They had been in an immigration detention facility in Bangkok for more than a decade. The secretive repatriation, which took place in the early hours of February 27, has been roundly condemned by U.N. experts, human rights groups, and Western governments including the United States, which claim that the Uyghurs are likely to face mistreatment or torture at the hands of the Chinese authorities. The Thai government has defended the move as essential to its national security, claiming that the Thai government has received Chinese assurances that the Uyghurs will be treated well.

Central Asia

In November, a number of top security officials in Uzbekistan – and the capital, Tashkent – were dismissed or shuffled to other posts. Soon after, some faced charges related to the October attempted assassination of former government official Komil Allamjonov. The secret trial for the assassination attempt is over, with 10 people facing punishment, but the purge continues. This week Uzbekistan’s Minister of Internal Affairs was replaced without explanation.

Source: IMF policy documents and Budget 2025

Sri Lanka has issued its first budget proposal under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, and it would see spending exceed the IMF’s recommended limits.

Society

Mǎ Zhǔxí, or Chairman Ma in Chinese, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Elon Musk that suggests he holds more power than the president (as the CCP chairman outranks China’s president).