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".

China doesn’t just exert heavy control over state media; its influence over media outlets outside China is expanding, according to a new report by Freedom House. For the past three years, the government has been investing millions of dollars in a global soft-power push. State newspaper China Daily publishes inserts of its English edition in major Western papers from the Washington Post to the New York Times. China’s Central Television, or CCTV, has hired dozens of experienced reporters from the US for its Washington bureau and rivals other foreign operations like Al-Jazeera America.

For years, Google has been developing ways to help people living under oppressive regimes thwart online suppression. Today, the company unveils three new tools to help advance the fight. Starting Monday, Google users in places like Iran, Syria, China, and Russia will be able to mask their online identity with the help of a friend in a censor-free country. Human-rights groups will have a new tool to stop their governments from shutting down their websites.

China’s Communist Party has begun ordering all Chinese journalists not to take supportive stances toward Japan when writing about territorial and historical issues between the two countries, participants of a mandatory training program revealed Saturday. Around 250,000 journalists who work for various Chinese media organizations must attend the nationwide training program to learn about such topics as Marxist views on journalism, laws and regulations and norms in news-gathering and editing, in order to get their press accreditation renewed.

Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition. The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, expectations were high—in Beijing and among the pro-mainland forces in Hong Kong—that identification with the Chinese nation would slowly but surely strengthen among the local population, especially among the younger generations, eventually solving the problem of Hong Kong’s full integration into China. Once the colonial education system ceased poisoning young minds, it was thought, future generations would embrace the worldview and politics favored in Beijing.