Society

What Happened: In early January, as a potential ban on TikTok loomed, hundreds of thousands of Americans began to download an alternative app: RedNote, which is also owned by a Chinese company. The surge in RedNote’s popularity was fed by a social media campaign, which underscored the app’s similarities to TikTok – but supposedly without the same cybersecurity and data privacy concerns. While many assumed the migration to RedNote was a natural consequence of the TikTok ban, it was, in fact, the result of a well-coordinated campaign driven by China-backed influencers.

Our Focus: Researchers at ThinkFi charted social media posts, especially on X (formerly Twitter) during RedNote’s rapid rise. Similarities in the postings (using not only the same hashtags but also similar arguments and language) as well as the limited number of posts vs the expanded reach (277 posts from just 20 users were viewed over 22 million times) suggests a coordinated campaign by pro-China influencers, which was amplified by bot activity. Accounts using the hashtags #TikTokRefugee and #RedNote exhibited “high tweet volumes in short timeframes, repetitive hashtags, and minimal genuine engagement…. The accounts involved in these tweets were largely from the same influencers, many of whom are known for pushing pro-China narratives.” A similar drive promoting RedNote was being done on other social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, and TikTok itself.

What Comes Next: If this was a CCP-backed influence campaign, it was a wild success. As posts about RedNote surged, so did the app’s popularity; it jumped from under 4,000 downloads in the U.S. on January 10 to over 230,000 downloads on January 14, the day the social media campaign spiked. Whether or not the CCP was behind the campaign, it certainly sought to capitalize on it, with a wave of articles in Chinese state media praising RedNote as an important channel of China-U.S. people-to-people engagement. What the social media campaign didn’t note was that there’s no reason to believe that RedNote – which operates in the same legal environment as TikTok, where the CCP requires access to user data upon demand – is any safer.

INTERVIEW

Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. and currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, on Islamabad’s view of the Modi-Trump joint statement: “Pakistan was rattled because the statement came so soon after the inauguration of the new president. But the Trump administration is unconventional, and joint statements mean less under this president, who will act in a transactional manner.”

Northeast Asia

Tuesday marked the 14th anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The “3/11” disaster sparked an unprecedented effort to cleanup and decommission the plant – one of the most complex and ambitious undertakings in environmental and technological history. With a 40-year timeline, the plant’s final decommissioning is progressing slowly but steadily, largely through the use of entirely new technology.

South Asia

March 8 marked International Women’s Day. In South Asia, however, celebrations of women’s progress were tempered by the severity of existing issues. Gender-based violence is rampant in Pakistan and India, as are sexual assaults. Legal accountability for these crimes is negligible. What progress has been made faces pushback from conservative elements stepped in patriarchal mindsets. Yet no government is more complicit in the abuse of women than the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, with its implementation of a full-scale “gender apartheid.”

Southeast Asia

Philippine police this week arrested former President Rodrigo Duterte in connection with the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s ongoing investigation into his violent “war on drugs.” The 79-year-old was arrested on March 11 at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport after returning from Hong Kong, not long after The Hague-based court issued a warrant for his arrest. He was then quickly flown to The Hague to face charges related to his bloody anti-narcotics drive, which led to anywhere between 12,000 and 30,000 deaths. The ICC authorized an investigation into the drug war killings in 2021. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. initially refused to cooperate with the ICC, saying that it had no jurisdiction over the Philippines. But as the political feud between the Marcoses and Dutertes has deepened, the administration has shifted its tone on the ICC probe. Its decision to implement the court’s arrest warrant is likely to raise the political temperature ahead of midterm elections due in May, with unforeseen but potentially destabilizing implications.

Central Asia

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have come a long way from firing shots at each other across their contested border during the deadly violence of September 2022. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon is visiting the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, this week to sign a long-awaited border deal. The visit comes mere weeks before a first-ever trilateral summit in which the Kyrgyz and Tajik presidents will be joined by Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who made regional cooperation a top priority when he came to power in 2016.

After their homes were destroyed by a fire, Rohingya refugees living in a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, discuss rebuilding efforts. Fire incidents in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh have become a frequent and devastating occurrence.

Magazine

Uraan (meaning “take-off”), the Pakistan government’s five-year economic transformation program targeting what it called the “5 Es” – Exports, E-Pakistan, Equity, Environment, and Energy.