Against the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Southeast Asia is slowly but surely turning into a battleground for international tech companies to flex their financial muscles and impart their data-driven dominance. From Apple to Samsung, Alibaba to Uber, a plethora of other entities have made their mark in this highly robust region. It must be said that China’s influence in the area is second to none.

Southeast Asia has been a significant venue for strategic competition between the United States (US) and China for a long time. The great power tussle between the two is best conceptualised in the dual hierarchy model posited by Princeton University Professor of International Affairs, Gilford John Ikenberry.

Last month, US President Donald Trump enacted steel and aluminum tariffs aimed squarely at China. On April 2, China retaliated with tariffs on 128 American products. Trump then announced 25% tariffs on another 1,300 Chinese products, representing some $50 billion of exports.

Across Southeast Asia, policy makers hungry for infrastructure investment are looking beyond China.Southeast Asia’s economies will need to spend about $2.8 trillion on projects like roads, bridges, ports and railways from 2016 to 2030 in order to maintain economic growth and reduce poverty, the Asian Development Bank reckons.And while China has stepped in to fund some of those investments with its almost-$1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, Southeast Asian governments are finding home-grown

At approximately 4 a.m. Syrian time, a unilateral US-led effort joined by the French and British, launched more than 100 missiles towards the Syrian capital of Damascus. The primary targets – two chemical weapons storage and production sites and another research facility said to be involved in the development of chemical weapons. The strikes come as a response to the alleged chemical weapons attack by the ruling regime, on civilians in the Damascus enclave of Douma.

The foreign ministers of China and Japan agreed to work closely to push North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, in the latest sign of improved cooperation between Asia’s two largest economies.

Markets are quivering as fears of a U.S.-China trade war ebb and flow. Thus far, they've mostly been focused on tariffs that President Donald Trump wants to impose on a range of Chinese goods, and China's threats to retaliate. But investors may be overlooking a bigger risk in this dispute.It's true that duties on U.S. imports would hurt – hands are already wringing in farm country – but there's a limit to how much pain they can really inflict.

“I want to clearly tell everyone that China’s open doors will not close, but will only open wider,” China’s President, Xi Jinping proclaimed to rousing applause from attendees at the Boao Forum for Asia in China’s Hainan province last Tuesday. The Boao Forum, which also goes by the sobriquet, “The Davos of Asia” was attended by foreign heads of governments and industry movers and shakers from the world over, mostly from the Asian region.

With China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now in the works, Singapore is not to be side-lined from this grand agenda.

China’s massive build program to recreate trade routes stretching from Asia to Africa and Europe is gaining momentum.Since President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road project was announced about five years ago, it gave impetus to billions of dollars of Chinese investment – some of which were already in the pipeline for several years – to build railways, roads, ports and power plants.Here’s a quick take on what Xi describes as the ‘project of the century’The program isn’t without controversy