TAIPEI -- Taiwan's Gogoro, a leading battery-swapping electric scooter maker, announced on Thursday that it will merge with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a $2.35 billion deal to list in New York by early 2022 as it continues to ride the global clean energy wave.

Gogoro is one of Taiwan's most valuable startups and counts the National Development Fund, a government funding vehicle, and Temasek, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, as investors. It

HONG KONG -- The organizers of Hong Kong's annual commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are deleting the contents of the group's website and social media accounts under order of police.

The move marks the first known instance of the city's police invoking powers granted under the national security law imposed last year by Beijing to eliminate online content if there are "reasonable grounds" to suspect they could pose a security threat.

The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China said

BEIJING -- China has formally moved to join a Pacific trade pact involving Japan, Australia, Malaysia and other regional economies, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said Thursday.

Beijing seeks to join the 11-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), formerly called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao presented China's application to New Zealand counterpart Damien O'Connor and discussed the upcoming process by telephone. Documents were submitted to support the application.

New Zealand acts as

SHANGHAI -- Chinese e-tailer JD.com opens its first brick-and-mortar mall this month in the city of Xi'an, looking to further blend online and offline retail operations.

The JD Mall officially opens Sept. 30, selling 200,000 items across an area of over 40,000 sq. meters in the central Chinese city. Tenants range from electronics companies like Huawei Technologies and Haier to restaurants and home goods stores.

The mall will include beauty

JAKARTA -- Qatari communications company Ooredoo and Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings have agreed to merge their Indonesian telecom businesses in a deal to create the country's second-largest mobile network operator.

Both companies said in a statement Thursday they had signed "definitive transaction agreements for the proposed merger" of Indosat Ooredoo and Hutchison 3 Indonesia. The combined entity will have an estimated annual revenue of about $3 billion, they said.

Indonesia has seen a surge in mobile data usage during the COVID-19 pandemic,

Tetsushi Takahashi was Nikkei's China bureau chief from April 2017 to March 2021 and the writer for the Beijing Diary column.

TOKYO -- The leadership election for Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, set for Sept. 29, has drawn keen interest from observers around the world, including China. But Japan's premiership is not the only thing at stake in the vote. Beijing is also concerned about how much influence the pro-China heavyweight LDP Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai

TOKYO/WASHINGTON/BEIJING -- A surge in commodity prices has worried both China and the U.S., pushing each side to intensify efforts to combat the trend.

For the first time ever, the Chinese government will release part of the country's strategic oil reserves into the market, conducting a bid for 7.38 million barrels of petroleum on Sept. 24.

This sale is aimed at "relieving the pressure of rising raw material prices," the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration said

Alexander Neill runs a strategic advisory consultancy in Singapore, with 20 years of experience focusing on Indo-Pacific security and geopolitics.

Yet another acronym surfaced in the alphabet soup bowl of defense alignments in the Indo-Pacific yesterday with the joint creation of an enhanced trilateral security partnership called AUKUS.

The leaders of the U.S., Australia and the U.K. heralded their joint resolve to deepen diplomatic, security and defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region to meet the challenges of the 21st-

MANILA -- As Zoom rose to become the pandemic era's top videoconferencing platform, the U.S. company turned to the Philippines, the world's call center capital, for customer and operations support.

The company was "seeking a cost-effective solution in the middle of a pandemic" when it launched in Manila late last year, and it has since tripled its head count, said Gian Reyes, vice president at KMC Solutions, Zoom's contractor.

Zoom is one of dozens of new contracts