For two years, the US State Department and the Pentagon have been incubating a plan to win the Afghan war without actually defeating the Taliban on the battleground. The idea is to triumph commercially by building a “New Silk Road”—a transportation-and-energy route to the West whose long-term financial dividends would prompt combatants to set aside their arms and get rich instead. Now China is stepping up an apparent effort to outpace the US plan to reconstruct the ancient trade route.

The shift in economic focus might sound very much like the U.S. pivot to Asia, and Russia has indeed begun to reassert its military presence in the Asia-Pacific like the United States and other regional powers. What is different, however, is that Moscow has taken great pains to emphasize that its primary goal is to cooperate, not compete, with Beijing. Russia denies that there is even the slightest element of trying to contain China in its regional policy.

One of the ways to think about China's Internet is as a Bizarro version of the World Wide Web. Facebook and Twitter are banned, but social networking sites like Sina Weibo and Kaixinwang operate freely. Instead of YouTube, there is Youku Tudou. And while Google does operate in China -- albeit intermittently -- the Chinese company Baidu dominates the search engine market. A foreign observer of the Chinese internet might conclude, to paraphrase Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction: "They've got the same stuff there that we do here, it's just ... a little bit different."

The sudden growth of China as a world economic power has alarmed a great many people in the West. For The Editors, a programme which sets out to ask challenging questions, I decided to find out whether China is the West's friend, or its enemy. People worry that China, which is still notionally Marxist-Leninist, will use its huge economic power to threaten liberal Western values.

Here's a fact: Nearly everyone in America loves Chinese food. Who among us doesn't have childhood memories of takeout dinners served in the distinctive white boxes, followed by a humorous reading of fortune cookies? And Chinese restaurants, with their lengthy menus and Lazy Susans, have been a ubiquitous part of the American landscape for decades. In order to get into the finer distinctions of Chinese cuisine, researchers at the Beijing Computational Science Ressn't difficult to find Northeastern, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Xinjiang restaurants -- all on the same block.

Thanks to the 2013 Chinese Training Program for EU Employees, some 30 officials got the opportunity to know more about China. Launched by the Hanban (Confucius Institute Headquarters) and organized by Beijing Foreign Studies University, the program, which lasts from July 20-28, is the first such cultural exchange platform in China designed for European Union employees, said Jing Wei, deputy director-general of Hanban.

Yesterday Freedom House released a report on Internet censorship in China based on information they collected for their Freedom on the Net survey. The report is especially interested in Internet censorship since the leadership transition that brought Xi Jinping to power last November. It not only examines the obstacles citizens face in getting Internet access, but also on what is censored, surveillance, and how citizens are punished by the state for their activities online.