Though it has received comparatively little attention, one of the most profound geopolitical trends of the early 21st century is gathering steam: China’s pivot to Central Asia. As American military forces withdraw from Afghanistan and gaze toward the Asia-Pacific, and while Washington’s European allies put NATO’s eastward expansion on the back burner, Central Asia has become China’s domain of investment and influence.

If such a thing is possible, Shanghai today beckons even more powerfully than it did in the past, playing a critical role among the great cities of the world beyond anything that could have been imagined. Shanghai’s future shines brilliantly, given its own dynamic economy and the larger Chinese economy of which it is a critical part. However, as China’s most prosperous city, Shanghai should not be afraid to strike out on its own or, more accurately, to define the terms of its development in its own way and according to its own history and understanding of its future.

The New Express's campaign to get Chen Yongzhou, 27, released from police detention last week attracted international attention, including CPJ's. On Wednesday and Thursday last week the Guangzhou-based New Express ran front page, big character headlines calling for their reporter's release. The paper's editors had thoroughly vetted Chen's stories and they had found only one factual error, they said in support of his reporting.

Abhijit Sanyal is sitting on a beach-chair watching frothy waves roll in from the Indian Ocean. He arrived in Tanzania a year ago after a career in his native India with Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods giant. ChemiCotex, an industrial company in Dar es Salaam, hired him as chief executive to oversee the expansion of its “tooth-and-nail business”, which dominates the Tanzanian market for dental care and metal goods.

Canberra’s foreign policies are a puzzle. Australia depends on China to take 35 percent of its exports. It may have to depend even more as its manufacturing base implodes — past mistakes mean it is about to lose almost all its car manufacturing industry. Yet Australia’s new conservative government has chosen this moment to tell the world that it wants to cooperate with Japan and the United States in their anti-China policies.

It was the other guy’s fault, no question. That’s pretty much the explanation for why a major science conference scheduled for December came close to being torpedoed. Astronomers from all over the world were planning to gather at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California, to talk about new results coming from the planet-hunting Kepler mission.

China's media regulator has vowed to protect "lawful reporting rights," state media said, in a rare official intervention over press freedom after a journalist was detained by police. Chen Yongzhou, with the New Express tabloid, was held last Friday on "suspicion of damaging business reputation" after he wrote a series of articles on "financial problems" at Zoomlion, a partly state-owned construction machinery manufacturer.

The Chinese government on Tuesday released a "white paper" defending its policies in Tibet, and accusing the Dalai Lama and his supporters of "conducting separatist activities" to "sabotage the development and stability of Tibet".