Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience.
"Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
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Kazakhstan and Georgia seal strategic Eurasian partnership SEOUL, June 30 (AJP) - Kazakhstan and Georgia signed a strategic partnership in Astana on Monday (local time), tying together a trade route and an oil pipeline that have taken on new weight as Russia's war in Ukraine closes off traditional routes and the war in Iran chokes the Strait of Hormuz. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze signed a Joint Statement along with memoranda on culture, tourism, and digital development, according to Kazakhstan's presidential press service, Akorda. The two leaders discussed trade, investment, and energy cooperation, including Kazakh oil exports through a pipeline that crosses Georgia on its way to the Turkish coast, and agreed to deepen cooperation on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the "Middle Corridor," linking East Asia to Europe without crossing Russian territory. Transit volume along the route has grown three and a half times over the past five years, the Kazakh presidency said. The Middle Corridor stretches 4,000 kilometers from western China to Eastern Europe through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus, and Turkiye. The corridor only became commercially significant after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when shippers began looking for routes free of sanctions risk and active conflict. Cargo volumes grew 62 percent in 2024 alone, reaching 4.5 million tons, and container traffic rose 37 percent in the first ten months of 2025, hitting 63,300 twenty-foot containers, according to Azerbaijan Railways and the Eurasian Transport Route Association. In April 2026, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkiye signed a joint roadmap aiming for 11 million tons of annual freight by 2030. Georgia sits at the western end of the corridor, where its Black Sea ports serve as the last stop before cargo crosses into Turkiye, while Kazakhstan anchors the eastern end, where its Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk handle the switch from rail to ferry on the way to Baku. The two countries are effectively the bookends of the route. Kazakhstan said that it wants to expand its presence at Georgian ports beyond Batumi to include Poti and Anaklia. Anaklia has long been planned as a deep-water port on Georgia's Black Sea coast, built to handle far larger cargo volumes than the country currently manages. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development estimates that fixing the corridor's bottlenecks will require around 18.5 billion euros ($210.8 billion) in investment. The energy discussions centered on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which runs 1,768 kilometers from Baku in Azerbaijan through Tbilisi in Georgia to the port of Ceyhan on Turkiye's Mediterranean coast. BP operates the Azerbaijani and Georgian sections of the pipeline, which has carried oil since 2006 and has carried Kazakh crude since October 2013. Kazakhstan shipped about 1.4 million tons of oil through the pipeline in 2024 and 1.3 million tons in 2025, according to the Kazakh Ministry of Energy, with plans to reach 1.6 million tons in 2026. That pipeline has gained new importance because of developments in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil trade normally flows. Iran declared the strait closed in early March 2026, after the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, and Iranian forces began attacking ships attempting to pass through it. The International Energy Agency called the resulting disruption the largest the global oil market has ever seen. A memorandum signed by the United States and Iran on June 17 set off a tentative reopening. Still, traffic through the strait remained far below normal when Tokayev and Kobakhidze met in Astana. War-risk insurance for tankers, which cost roughly 0.05 percent of a vessel's value before the war, climbed past 5 percent at the worst of the crisis, pricing most commercial shippers out of the route entirely. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline moves oil overland from landlocked Caspian fields to a Mediterranean port, bypassing the Persian Gulf altogether, which is precisely why it has drawn fresh attention since February. Kazakhstan's long-term goal is to ship 20 million tons of oil a year through the route, though reaching that figure would require substantial new investment in both the pipeline and the Caspian crossing points that feed it. The third agreement signed Monday covers artificial intelligence and digital development, linking Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development with Georgia's Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development. Both countries are trying to move beyond the economic models that built them, Kazakhstan beyond oil and Georgia beyond tourism and agriculture, and both have settled on technology as the tool to do it. Kazakhstan established its Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development in 2025, lifting AI policy to the level of a Deputy Prime Minister and signaling how seriously the government takes the shift. That same year the country switched on its first national supercomputer, a machine with two exaflops of processing power and 512 NVIDIA H200 chips, now running the country's national AI platform and its own language models. One of those models, KazLLM, launched in December 2024 after training on 148 billion tokens and was built to operate in both Kazakh and Russian. A new law setting risk-based rules for AI took effect in January 2026. More than 92 percent of Kazakh government services are now handled online, and the country ranks 24th in the world and 10th for online services specifically, in the latest United Nations E-Government survey. Georgia's technology sector has grown faster than its readiness to use AI. Information technology made up just 0.4 percent of Georgia's economy in 2019 but had grown to 5.2 percent by 2023, worth 4.2 billion lari, according to the Policy and Management Consulting Group. Yet only 2.2 percent of Georgian firms had adopted AI as of 2024, according to a UNESCO study, a gap the new memorandum is meant to begin closing. Tokayev closed the visit by awarding Kobakhidze the Order of Dostyk, First Class, an honor Akorda said recognized his role in strengthening ties between the two countries. 2026-06-30 13:43:04 -
Kookmin student wins 2nd at IBM hackathon SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - A student from Kookmin University in Seoul was placed second at the IBM Bob Hackathon on June 11 in a global artificial intelligence competition that drew more than 5,600 participants from around the world and challenged them to build working software in 48 hours, the university announced Monday. Kookmin University (KMU)'s AI Department student Kim Chan-joong competed alone in the hackerthon. The competition, jointly organized by IBM and NativelyAI, the company that runs the AI hackathon platform lablab.ai, received 503 project submissions from 1,672 teams in total. IBM Bob, the tool at the center of the competition, is an AI development agent that works directly inside a software developer's coding environment. Unlike conventional code assistants that respond to isolated queries, Bob reads an entire repository's context, understands developer intent across a codebase, and helps users move from an initial concept to a working application. Kim's submission, a web application named Atlas, targeted a common frustration in software development, which is making sense of an unfamiliar codebase. Large software projects routinely contain hundreds of folders and files, making it difficult for a new developer to grasp the overall structure at a glance. Atlas solves this by rendering a GitHub repository as a city map. GitHub is a widely used platform where developers share and store code publicly. In Atlas, top-level folders appear as color-coded districts. Individual files become buildings, their size determined by the volume of code they contain. Key files are highlighted like landmarks. The tool requires no installation. A user pastes the web address of a public repository into Atlas and the map is generated automatically, with layout calculations processed on the server. The result appears directly in a web browser. The finished map supports zooming, panning, hover tooltips displaying individual file details, and a full-image download. "I wanted to move away from the kinds of topics AI projects tend to gravitate toward and try something fresh," Kim said. "I had always found it took too long to get a sense of how an unfamiliar codebase was organized, and I wanted to solve that discomfort in a way that felt as intuitive as reading a city map." Kim said narrowing the project's scope early was a key factor in the result. "I cut back on ambition and focused on getting the core right. I want to use this experience as a foundation and keep pushing into new territory." 2026-06-29 16:13:30 -
Uzbekistan, Georgia set $1 billion trade target SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - Uzbekistan's President Shavkat Mirziyoyev paid an official visit to Georgia as the two countries pledged to more than triple bilateral trade, from $267.6 million in 2025 to $1 billion. The target is ambitious given where the relationship currently stands. Trade between the two countries tripled between 2017 and 2025, climbing from $89 million, but the flows remain heavily skewed. In 2025, Georgia exported $190.4 million worth of goods to Uzbekistan, more than double the $77.2 million that moved in the other direction. Georgian pharmaceuticals alone, at $89.3 million, were worth more than all of Uzbekistan's exports to Georgia combined. The figures come from analysis published by Uzbekistan's Center for Economic Research and Reforms. The presidential visit follows a trip to Uzbekistan by Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze in March 2025, when he met President Mirziyoyev and Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov. The two sides also held the 10th meeting of their Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, and the billion-dollar target emerged from those talks as the headline commitment. The two countries have held a free trade agreement since 1995. Its practical scope has widened as Uzbekistan's economy has shifted. In the 1990s, Uzbek trade was dominated by raw materials. Today, the country exports copper wire, rolled metal products, electrical equipment, processed food and tobacco, and Tashkent sees Tbilisi as both a market and a bridge to Europe through the South Caucasus and the Black Sea. That is partly what is driving Uzbekistan's investment in the Poti Free Industrial Zone on Georgia's Black Sea coast, where it is building a multi-purpose terminal on up to 30 hectares at a total cost of $18.3 million. The first phase is a cold storage facility rated at 1,000 tons. A 5,000-square-meter covered warehouse follows, then capacity for bulk, oversized and container cargo. The terminal is designed to move Uzbek goods toward European markets and bring European imports back into Central Asia. Poti sits on the Middle Corridor, the trade route connecting Central Asia with Europe via the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and the Black Sea. The route is expected to carry more traffic once construction begins on the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, a long-planned project that would link Uzbekistan directly to China by rail and feed additional cargo westward toward Georgian ports. Investment beyond the terminal has been limited. Total Georgian foreign direct investment in Uzbekistan reached $46 million over the nine years to 2025, spread across 60 registered companies. TBC Bank is the most prominent example of Georgian private capital in the country. The sectors both sides flagged as priorities are ones where the gap between current trade and potential is widest. Georgia imports around $539 million worth of textiles annually and $150 million worth of leather and footwear, most of it from other markets. Electrical goods represent another opening, with Georgia bringing in roughly $300 million a year in cables, transformers and household appliances. In pharmaceuticals, the two sides discussed easing the registration of Uzbek medicines in Georgia and establishing joint production facilities with Georgian distributors. A joint working group under the trade and economy ministries of both countries has been established to translate the commitments from the presidential visit into specific investment and infrastructure projects. 2026-06-29 14:07:53 -
KAIST appoints Bae Choong-sik as 18th president SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has appointed Bae Choong-sik, a mechanical engineering professor and specialist in carbon-neutral propulsion technology, as its 18th president, following a vote by the university's board of directors on Monday. The board, chaired by Kim Myung-ja, met at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology's (KAIST) Seoul campus in Gangnam District to make the selection. Founded in 1971 as South Korea's first research-oriented science and engineering university, KAIST is ranked 65th globally in the QS World University Rankings and enrolls around 10,000 students across its main campus in the central city of Daejeon, roughly 150 kilometers south of Seoul, and a secondary campus in the capital. Bae joined KAIST as a faculty member in 1998 and has built his career around clean combustion systems and low-emission propulsion technologies, areas that have taken on added urgency as South Korea works toward its carbon-neutrality targets. He holds a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Seoul National University and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London. Within the university, Bae has served as head of the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as dean of the College of Engineering. He was also named a Korea Electric Power Corporation Chair Professor, a designation reserved for faculty whose contributions to energy research and education are considered exceptional. His record extends beyond research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bae led the Science and Technology New Deal Task Force for Pandemic Response, an initiative that mobilized South Korea's scientific research capacity to support national crisis management. He has also served as chairman of the Carbon-Neutral Fuel Technology Research Society, where he has helped shape government policy on energy transition and future propulsion systems. Bae has additionally held an advisory role with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, chairing the Climate Division of the Science and Technology Diplomacy Advisory Committee, a position that places him at the intersection of environmental science and international relations at a time when energy policy has become a defining issue in diplomacy. The Society of Automotive Engineers, a global professional organization for mobility and propulsion engineers, named Bae the first Korean to receive the designation of SAE Fellow in the powertrain division, its highest individual honor. He has also received two SAE best paper awards. In South Korea, he received a Presidential Commendation in 2021 and a National Assembly Merit Award in 2024 for contributions to the automotive industry and national competitiveness. The appointment is not yet final. Bae must receive the consent of the Minister of Education and the formal approval of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT before taking office as KAIST's 18th president. 2026-06-29 13:55:42 -
Spiritual Asia (24): Gut, the mountain spirit, the seven stars, and the ancestors This is the twenty-fourth installment of AJP's Spiritual Asia series, which explores the religious traditions, philosophical ideas and moral foundations that have shaped Asia's civilizations. In this concluding chapter of our three-part journey through Japanese Shinto, we examine how a faith rooted in reverence for nature was transformed into an instrument of the modern state, and how it later returned to everyday life. K-culture re-awakens the spirituality of Korean shamanism Just a few years ago, when the world thought of South Korea, semiconductors, automobiles, and K-pop were the first things to come to mind. But now, interest has gone a step further, extending to Korean history, culture, and even spirituality. The Korean Wave no longer means only popular music and television dramas. An era has arrived in which the Korean people's inner world and symbolic vocabulary, accumulated over thousands of years, are being introduced to global audiences through film, animation, gaming, and the performing arts. One of the most prominent examples of this is K-Pop Demon Hunters. The work is not a simple action fantasy. It is a cultural creation that reinterprets Korean shamanism, folk legends, and traditional symbols in a contemporary idiom, layered over the modern cultural platform of K-pop. Many of its elements carry the additions of creative imagination, but underlying them is a worldview that traces back to Korean shamanism and traditional belief. This is why the work has landed as something fresh for audiences around the world. Korean shamanism has long held that the visible world and the invisible world are not entirely severed from each other. Human beings live within nature, ancestors and descendants remain connected through memory, and life and death are understood to exist within a single vast cycle. The shaman was the figure who bridged that boundary. The gut was the ritual that restored it. K-Pop Demon Hunters moves this traditional worldview into the structure of a contemporary story. The tiger that appears repeatedly within the work is not merely a fierce predator in Korean culture. The tiger is a sacred creature that guards the mountains and a symbol of the protector who repels evil spirits. In folk paintings, the tiger is sometimes depicted with dignity and sometimes with humor, but always as a figure that connects the human and the natural world. This is why the tiger appears beside the mountain spirit in paintings of the sanshin. Koreans received the tiger as both an object of awe and a symbol of justice and courage. These symbolic meanings live on naturally within contemporary creative work. The image of the jeosung saja, the messenger of the underworld, that appears in the work is also distinctly Korean. In Western culture, death is often portrayed as an object of fear, but the Korean jeosung saja is not necessarily an evil being. He is a figure who guides a person whose life has ended along a designated path, and he symbolizes the order that judges the goodness and wrongdoing of human beings. The Korean jeosung saja therefore carries a meaning closer to order and ethics than to terror. The fact that contemporary dramas, films, and animations make frequent use of this image is rooted in this cultural background. Another important figure is the gwisin, the ghost. In Korean culture, a ghost is not simply a monster. In many cases it is understood as a soul carrying han, the distinctly Korean weight of unresolved sorrow, a being who could not have a grievance settled or a love fulfilled. This is why in traditional Korean narrative there are many stories not of simply driving the ghost away but of listening to its story and resolving its resentment. This is the spirit of haewon, the resolution of grievance. In Korean shamanism, the gut is itself a ritual of haewon. Releasing sorrow, soothing resentment, and helping both the living and the dead find their proper place were among the central meanings of the gut. This worldview of haewon runs deep throughout Korean culture as a whole. Pansori and folk songs, mask dances and the gut all sing of sorrow while never abandoning hope in the end. The quality of Korean art in which tears and laughter exist together is connected precisely to this shamanic sensibility. That K-Pop Demon Hunters moved global audiences was not simply because of the action. It is because this distinctly Korean emotional register gave the work its depth. The rituals, talismans, and symbolic patterns that appear within the work can also be seen as elements drawing inspiration from traditional shamanism. Contemporary creative work is, of course, a domain of artistic invention and does not recreate traditional ritual as it stands. But the broad framework, the opposition between good and evil, the connection between the invisible world and the human world, the ritual intended to protect the community, touches the long-standing worldview of Korean shamanism. For global audiences, this arrives as an imagination that is unfamiliar and yet compelling. Today, K-pop is becoming more than a simple music genre. It is becoming a platform that carries Korean culture within it. Hanbok and hanok, jangseung and sotdae, tigers and mountain spirits, the jeosung saja and the philosophy of haewon are all being introduced to the world stage. Culture is the most powerful form of diplomacy, and spirituality is the deepest root of culture, the one that survives the longest. Korean shamanism is no longer a relic of the past but a living cultural heritage being reinterpreted through contemporary creative work and entering into dialogue with the world. In this regard, K-Pop Demon Hunters carries real significance. The work merits attention because it does not consume Korean shamanism as mere superstition but attempts to translate Korean symbols, emotional sensibility, and communal consciousness into a contemporary language. Not every scene faithfully reflects traditional shamanism. But one fact is clear: the ancient spirituality of Korea is finding new life within global popular culture. Korean shamanism has, across many centuries, accompanied the joys and sorrows of people at the boundaries of mountain and field, village and home, life and death. Now that spirituality is meeting the world again through the screens of the digital age. In the past, the gut held the community together as one. Today, cultural content is connecting people across national borders. The times have changed, but the human impulse to seek meaning and find consolation has not. This is why Korean shamanism continues to breathe today, and it is also the fundamental reason K-culture earns the empathy of people around the world. One of the deep roots of the Korean imagination that K-culture is introducing to the world is shamanism. But the essence of shamanism was never in summoning spirits or divining the future. It was the wisdom by which a community learned to live together, a philosophy of daily life that sought to understand nature and humanity, ancestor and descendant, life and death, within a single order. To understand Korean shamanism, then, one must look at the gut, the mountain spirit, the seven stars, the village guardian shrines, and ancestor worship as a single organic world. At the center of shamanism is the gut. Today, when some people hear the word gut they think first of superstition or sorcery, but historically the gut was a communal ritual. When drought struck a village, people gathered to pray for rain together. When disease spread, villagers assembled to pray that the disaster would pass. The gut was also the occasion for praying for a good harvest, for a rich catch from the sea, for peace in the household and health for children. In other words, the gut was a social ritual through which a community confirmed its hopes and comforted one another. In the space of the gut, music and dance and song all come together. The janggu drum, the buk, the kkwaenggwari, and the jing ring out, and the people clap along and take part. This was not simple festivity but a process of healing through which the community shared sorrow and joy alike. Contemporary psychology has produced considerable research showing that music, dance, and collective participation carry therapeutic effects. In this sense, the gut can be understood as a practice of communal healing that Koreans cultivated long ago. Among the presences that cannot be left out of Korean shamanism is the mountain spirit, the sanshin. South Korea is a country whose land is largely composed of mountains. Mountains produce water, grow forests, and hold life within them. The mountain was therefore not simply a geographical feature but the very source of life. The sanshin was the figure who symbolized that order of life. The reason that ancient temples across the country have a sanshin shrine is that after Buddhism arrived in Korea it came to harmonize with indigenous belief. Buddhism did not reject the mountain spirit but embraced it, and the spirituality of the Korean people chose integration over conflict. The tiger that always appears alongside the mountain spirit in paintings is not mere decoration. The tiger is a guardian that protects the mountain and a symbol of justice and courage. In folk paintings, the tiger is not a creature that terrorizes the people but is depicted at times with humor and a human quality. This reveals a Korean understanding of nature in which human beings and the natural world are not in opposition but in coexistence. Next is the faith of the seven stars, the chilseong. The Big Dipper has from ancient times symbolized life, longevity, and blessing. When a child was born, people prayed to the deity of the seven stars for health. When they sought peace for the household, offerings were made to the seven stars with devotion. Even today, old temples retain a seven-stars shrine, a prominent example of how Buddhism, as it took root in Korea, came to harmonize with indigenous belief. Korean religion has developed not by one tradition displacing another entirely but by each holding the other within itself. Another important element is the faith surrounding the village guardian shrines, the seonghwangdang and the seonangdang. The large trees and stone mounds at the edge of a village, the shrines of the village guardian deity, were symbols of the village community. Each year the villagers gathered to hold rites together, praying for a good harvest, for peace, and for the warding off of illness. This was a religious observance and at the same time a social occasion that bound the community together as one. A substantial number of the roots of today's festivals and village events can be traced back to these traditions. The deepest foundation of Korean spirituality is ancestor worship. Koreans did not regard death as an ending. The ancestor was not a being who had left the family but a being who continued to watch over the descendants. Ancestral rites were therefore not a mere formality but a ritual of memory and gratitude. Hyo, filial devotion, was not a virtue directed only toward living parents but a culture that carried the thread from one generation to the next. Embedded within it was the belief that a person who remembers the ancestors does not forget the roots of the self, and a person who knows the roots of the self holds the community dear. These traditions continue in various forms today. The Lunar New Year and Chuseok ancestral rites, the culture of visiting and tending graves, the custom of families coming together to honor their ancestors have changed in form with the passing of time but remain alive in Korean life. This is not simple ritual but a cultural memory that carries the thread between generations. The most defining characteristic of Korean shamanism is integration over rejection. The mountain spirit entered into Buddhism. The seven stars were enshrined within the temple. Confucian ritual culture merged with ancestor worship. Now contemporary art, culture, and popular entertainment are reinterpreting these traditions in new ways. This is the flexibility and openness that Korean culture possesses. Today, living in the age of artificial intelligence, we experience dazzling advances in science and technology. Yet technology cannot resolve every human loneliness, every sorrow, every sense of loss. People still desire comfort, desire community, and seek the meaning of life. Korean shamanism has answered precisely these fundamental human questions with the language of community, nature, ancestor, and memory. Korean shamanism is therefore not a relic of the past. It is a spirit alive within Korean culture and a spiritual asset that speaks to the world through K-culture. The gut was a ritual of communal healing. The mountain spirit was a symbol of nature and life. The seven stars signified the harmony between the cosmos and humanity. Ancestor worship was a culture of memory that carried the thread between generations. All of these, woven together, have made Korea what it is today. 2026-06-29 13:17:06 -
Tungsten race puts Kazakhstan between US and China SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - Last November, at a summit in Washington where President Donald Trump hosted the leaders of all five Central Asian nations, the United States signed a deal giving an American company development rights to what independent feasibility studies describe as the world's largest known undeveloped tungsten resource. The host country was Kazakhstan. The metal was tungsten. The company is Kaz Resources, a newly formed American firm backed by up to $1.6 billion in potential federal financing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed a memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan's Ministry of Industry and Construction at the summit. Trump had negotiated the final terms with Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev directly, by telephone, weeks before. "It's the only project that President Trump and Secretary Howard Lutnick have been involved with directly in the negotiations and discussions with President Tokayev," Pini Althaus, executive chairman of Kaz Resources, told Fastmarkets in March 2026. The deal is a measure of how urgently Washington views its position in tungsten, a metal it has not produced commercially since 2015 and which China spent the past year systematically cutting off from Western supply chains. The ground at the center of that effort lies in Kazakhstan's Karaganda region, in the heart of a country that spent seven decades as a Soviet republic and emerged with some of the world's largest untapped mineral reserves. Outside the village of Unrek, population 407, a string of water-filled craters sits across the steppe. Soviet engineers dug them during the Cold War, searching for tungsten in a landscape that offered little but distance. They confirmed what they were looking for. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the workers left, and the craters filled with rain. Those holes are now at the center of a 21st-century supply chain war. The two deposits are Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty, less than 32 kilometers apart in the Karaganda mining district, roughly 160 kilometers south of the city of Karaganda. Feasibility studies completed in April 2023 reported JORC-compliant mineral resources of 1.4 million tons of tungsten trioxide across both sites. Cove Kaz Capital Group, the operating entity behind Kaz Resources, holds a 70 percent interest in the joint venture, with Kazakhstan's state mining company Tau-Ken Samruk retaining 30 percent. Cove Kaz describes the combined asset as the world's largest known undeveloped tungsten deposit. Planned annual output at full development is 12,000 metric tons, approximately 15 percent of current global production. Kazakhstan holds an estimated two million tons of tungsten resources in total, placing it second in the world after China according to analysis by China's Geological Survey. For most of the post-Soviet period, those resources sat largely untouched. What changed was not Kazakhstan. It was China. In February 2025, Beijing imposed export licensing controls on tungsten products, including ammonium paratungstate (APT), the refined intermediate from which tungsten metal and carbide are manufactured. By late 2025, shipments had effectively stopped. Data from China's General Administration of Customs showed the combined annual export volume of APT powder, and tungsten carbide powder fell approximately 41.7 percent year on year in 2025, to roughly 3,877 tons. In January and February 2026, APT exports dropped to zero. In those same two months, China recorded a net import of 1,363 metric tons of tungsten metal content, compared with a net export of 545 metric tons a year earlier. The country responsible for nearly four-fifths of global tungsten supply had become a net importer of it. Prices moved accordingly. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey showed the Rotterdam benchmark for APT rising from $331 to $675 per metric ton unit over the course of 2025. By January 2026, Fastmarkets assessed the same benchmark at $1,090 to $1,150 per metric ton unit, more than three times the level at the start of the previous year. In a February 2026 research note, analysts at BMO Global Commodities Research warned the world had "sleepwalked" into a tungsten crisis, driven by declining ore grades in Chinese mines, tightening environmental restrictions, and years of underinvestment elsewhere. The severity of that crisis traces back to what tungsten actually is. It has the highest melting point of any element on earth, 3,422 degrees Celsius, and a density approaching that of gold. In carbide form it is virtually irreplaceable in cutting tools and drill bits. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) classifies it as a critical mineral; the defense establishment calls it a war metal: it goes into armor-piercing projectiles, missile warheads, and fighter jet components, and is essential in semiconductor interconnects. USGS data placed China's 2025 output at 67,000 metric tons against a world total of 85,000. Washington was not the only power that understood what a disruption to that supply would mean. China had already moved into Kazakhstan before the American deal was announced. The Boguty mine in Almaty Oblast, near the Chinese border, entered commercial production in April 2025 under Jiaxin International Resources Investment, a Hong Kong-listed Chinese company. Targeted output for 2026 is approximately 7,085 metric tons of contained tungsten oxide. In the south of Kazakhstan, a Chinese company mines tungsten. In the center, an American company is preparing to do the same. Kazakhstan has played both sides through what Tokayev calls a "multivector" foreign policy, the deliberate balancing of competing interests from Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. The country participates in a Russian-led military alliance and a Chinese-led trade bloc, yet signed 29 agreements with American companies at the Washington summit worth over $17 billion. The U.S. accounts for only five percent of Kazakhstan's critical minerals exports, according to The Diplomat, while China takes 27 percent and Russia 16 percent. At the summit in November 2025, Tokayev declared that Trump had been "sent by heaven." "Our economic security depends on our ability to diversify our access to critical minerals," Sergio Gor, the U.S. special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, said at a C5+1 critical minerals dialogue in Astana in June 2026, according to the Times of Central Asia. The consequences extend beyond Central Asia. No single fact makes that clearer than what happened in South Korea's Gangwon Province on March 16, 2026. That was the day the Sangdong mine returned to production after 32 years. Sangdong once generated 70 percent of South Korea's total export earnings during the country's post-war reconstruction in the 1960s. It closed in 1994, undercut by cheap Chinese supply. Almonty Industries, a Canadian mining company that acquired the site in 2015, invested more than $100 million rebuilding it as a modern underground operation. Almonty projects that at full capacity, following a second expansion targeted for 2027, Sangdong will supply approximately 40 percent of global tungsten demand outside China. The mine's ore grade, at approximately 0.51 percent tungsten trioxide, is roughly three times the global average, with an expected mine life of at least 45 years. "This is a significant milestone in the effort by the U.S. and its allies to diversify supply chains for critical minerals away from China," Lewis Black, chairman, president and chief executive of Almonty, said at the mine's commissioning ceremony in March 2026, "which currently produces approximately 88 percent of the world's tungsten supply." 2026-06-29 12:45:05 -
Korean researchers measure tree carbon with LiDAR SEOUL, June 26 (AJP) - A ground-based laser scanner can now map the full three-dimensional structure of a tree precisely enough to calculate how much carbon it stores, without cutting, drilling, or attaching anything to the tree. That is the finding of a joint study by Kookmin University and the National Sejong Arboretum, published in the Journal of the Korean Cadastre Information Society in April 2026. The technology relies on LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a remote sensing method that fires rapid pulses of laser light and measures how long each pulse takes to bounce back. The result is a dense cloud of data points, each representing a specific location on the surface of the object being scanned. The same basic technology powers the sensors in self-driving cars and aerial survey drones, but here the scanner is positioned on the ground and pointed at individual trees. From that point cloud, the researchers applied a technique called Quantitative Structure Modelling, which uses the data to reconstruct the tree's full three-dimensional geometry: trunk, branches, and the way they connect. That reconstruction produces a precise volume estimate for each tree. The team then used those figures to calculate aboveground biomass, the total mass of organic material above ground, and from there, how much carbon the tree holds. The study was conducted on four species planted at the National Sejong Arboretum and surrounding residential gardens in Sejong City, South Korea's purpose-built administrative capital: zelkova, dawn redwood, pine, and horse chestnut. The relevance of this method lies in where it can realistically be applied. Standard approaches to measuring tree carbon storage rely on allometric equations, mathematical formulas that estimate a tree's total mass from its trunk diameter and height. Those formulas were developed primarily for forest trees, which tend to grow in uniform stands of the same species under consistent conditions. Urban trees are different. They are pruned, grow in confined spaces, and often stand alongside several other species in small parks, gardens, and roadside plantings. These conditions make forest-derived formulas unreliable for city green spaces. Hwang Se-yeon, a master's student in forest resources at Kookmin University who led the research, said the study established a foundation for automating the entire process from tree structure measurement to carbon storage calculation in urban green spaces with complex layouts and varied tree forms. The research is part of a broader collaboration. Kookmin University (Kookmin) and the Korea Arboretum and Garden Management Institute, the state body that manages South Korea's national arboretums and gardens, signed an agreement in September 2024 to jointly develop technologies for enhancing carbon absorption in urban forests. The previous year's work produced a drone LiDAR-based carbon prediction formula for garden trees. Ground-based LiDAR, used in this study, operates at closer range and captures finer structural detail. 2026-06-26 15:46:14 -
Kazakhstan and China Set Trade Target of $100 Billion Approximately 85% of land cargo traveling from China to Europe passes through Kazakhstan. This statistic underscores the motivation behind the recent meeting in Urumqi, where officials from both countries gathered to enhance their already record-breaking trade relations. During the 9th China-Eurasia Expo, Kazakhstan's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Economy Serik Jumangarin held a bilateral meeting with China's State Councilor Ding Xuexiang. According to a report by Kazinform, citing the Kazakhstan government, the two sides discussed expanding trade, joint investments, and building transportation infrastructure for the China-Europe logistics corridor. Trade between the two countries reached a record high of $48.7 billion in 2025. From January to May 2026, trade totaled $22 billion, marking a 27% increase compared to the same period last year. Authorities expect annual trade to exceed $50 billion this year. Jumangarin proposed a more ambitious target, stating, "Our core goal is to raise bilateral trade to $100 billion in the near future," and urged for the swift approval of a Kazakhstan-China trade and economic cooperation program and roadmap for 2027-2030. According to a Kazakhstan government report, more than half of the total trade between the two countries transits through the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, making it a critical trade gateway. Kazakhstan is also accelerating efforts to enhance border crossing capabilities. Once the new Bakhti-Ayagoz border checkpoint is completed, the combined annual processing capacity of the three border checkpoints along the Kazakhstan-China border will reach 100 million tons. Chinese officials confirmed readiness to jointly construct a third railway border checkpoint, which both sides expect will improve the reliability and safety of international transport routes. Since Kazakhstan's independence, China has invested approximately $30 billion in the Kazakh economy, making it one of the largest foreign investors. Jumangarin encouraged Chinese companies to participate in high-value production projects, highlighting key cooperation areas such as deep processing of agricultural products like wheat and corn, integrated steel production, agrochemicals, and drone manufacturing. He noted, "This expo showcased advanced achievements in agrochemicals and drone manufacturing," adding, "We want to invite relevant manufacturers and investors to Kazakhstan. We are ready to provide all necessary conditions for localizing production." Ding reaffirmed China's commitment to expanding cooperation with Kazakhstan in the fields of digital economy, artificial intelligence, energy, and navigation technology. Bilateral agricultural trade amounts to $2 billion. China has approved the import of 34 agricultural products from Kazakhstan, with nine additional items, including chilled meat, currently under further review.* This article has been translated by AI. 2026-06-26 15:12:00 -
Nature debuts autonomous robotics conference at KAIST SEOUL, June 26 (AJP) - Nature will hold its first conference dedicated to autonomous robotics at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in the central city of Daejeon, South Korea, this October, bringing together some of the world's leading researchers to debate the future of intelligent machines, the prominent institute said Friday. The three-day event, titled "2026 Nature Conference: Autonomous Robotics," runs from October 13 to 15 on the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) campus. According to KAIST, which co-hosts the conference alongside Nature, the journal has held more than 50 academic events on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and energy, with institutions including Princeton University and Tsinghua University. A conference centered solely on autonomous robotics is a first. KAIST is not an arbitrary venue. The institution developed South Korea's first robotic arm, known as KAISEM, as well as an early intelligent service robot called AMI and HUBO, the humanoid robot that became a symbol of the country's robotics ambitions. The choice of Daejeon signals that the conference is as much about showcasing where the field stands as it is about deciding where it should go. Four keynote speakers will anchor the program. Sami Haddadin, vice president for research at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, developed the Franka Emika Panda, a seven-axis collaborative robot capable of fluid, human-like arm movement. Kwon In-so, head of the Physical AI Research Division at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and a professor in KAIST's Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, has led domestic research in computer vision and robot intelligence and was named among the world's top 100 AI talents. Aude Billard, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), is a leading authority on robot manipulation control and machine learning algorithms. Steven H. Collins of Stanford University specialises in exoskeleton systems and wearable robotics. The programme covers robot intelligence, autonomous field operation, and human-centered robotics across two days of sessions. Topics include neuromorphic artificial intelligence for autonomous drones, multimodal robotics, next-generation tactile sensor design, and advances in physical AI. Attendees will have access to one-on-one meetings with Nature editors and structured sessions on international research collaboration and academic publishing. KAIST will use the conference to put several of its flagship projects on display. Kong Kyoung-chul's WalkON Suit, an exoskeleton robot that won the Cybathlon international competition twice in succession, will be among the exhibits. The Cybathlon, held every four years in Switzerland, challenges teams to develop assistive technologies for people with disabilities and is sometimes called the Cyborg Olympics. Park Hae-won's quadruped robot Hound, which set a Guinness World Record for a 100-meter run, is also scheduled for demonstration, as are Sim Hyun-chul's PIBOT, a humanoid robot designed to operate aircraft, and DreamWaQ, a vision-based quadruped locomotion system developed by Myung Hyun. "Robot intelligence and autonomous operation technologies are the key technologies that will transform future industries and society," said Yoo Seung-hyeop, head of KAIST's Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. "We hope this conference will become a starting point for expanding global research collaboration and accelerating innovation in autonomous robotics." KAIST President Lee Kwang-hyung framed the event in broader terms. "The next stage of AI is the physical world, and autonomous robotics is the key technology that will lead that change," he said. "Through this conference, KAIST will work with world-class researchers to present the direction of future robot technology and lead the establishment of a global innovation ecosystem." The conference will be conducted in English and is open to researchers, students, and industry professionals working in autonomous robotics. Early registration closes on July 31. General registration runs until October 6. 2026-06-26 10:01:48 -
Kazakhstan and China target $100bn in trade SEOUL, June 26 (AJP) - More than eight in every 10 containers shipped overland from China to Europe pass through Kazakhstan. That single statistic, more than any diplomatic formula, explains why the two countries spent this week in Urumqi pressing to deepen a commercial relationship already generating record numbers. On the sidelines of the 9th China-Eurasia Expo on Thursday (local time), Kazakhstan's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Economy Serik Zhumangarin met with Ding Xuexiang, Vice Premier of the State Council of China. The talks, according to Kazakhstan's state-operated news agency Qazinform, covered trade expansion, joint investment, and transport infrastructure along the China-to-Europe corridor. Bilateral trade hit a record $48.7 billion in 2025. In the first five months of 2026, trade reached $22 billion, a 27 percent rise compared to the same period last year. Officials forecast the full-year total will exceed $50 billion. Zhumangarin set a more ambitious horizon. "Our main objective is to achieve bilateral trade of $100 billion in the near future," he said, calling for accelerated approval of a Trade and Economic Cooperation Program and Roadmap for 2027 to 2030. More than half of all bilateral trade flows through China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Kazakhstani government report noted, making it the primary commercial gateway between the two countries. Kazakhstan is expanding its border-crossing capacity. With the construction of a new crossing at Bakhty-Ayagoz, the combined capacity of three crossings on the Kazakhstan-China border will reach 100 million tons of cargo per year. The Chinese side confirmed it was ready to jointly build a third railway crossing, which officials said would improve the reliability and security of international transport routes. China has invested approximately $30 billion in Kazakhstan since the country's independence, making it one of the largest foreign investors in the Kazakhstani economy. Zhumangarin invited Chinese businesses to participate in projects centered on high value-added production, including deep processing of wheat and corn, full-cycle metallurgical production, and manufacturing of agrochemicals and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). "Today, the exhibition featured advanced achievements in agrochemicals and drone manufacturing," he said. "We would like to invite these producers and investors to Kazakhstan. We are ready to provide all the necessary conditions for the localization of production." Ding reaffirmed China's interest in expanding cooperation with Kazakhstan in the digital economy, artificial intelligence, energy, and navigation technologies. Agricultural trade between the two countries has reached two billion US dollars. China has approved imports of 34 categories of Kazakhstani agricultural products. Nine more categories, including chilled meat, are currently under review. 2026-06-26 09:25:55