A Chinese online game developer has released a military-backed video game that allows players to fight alongside Chinese troops in seizing disputed Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea. The Glorious Mission Online game series is the first to be developed jointly by a Chinese company and the People's Liberation Army. Its release date coincides with the 86th anniversary of the PLA's founding.

If the box office is anything to go by, Godzilla – the most famous Japanese monster of old (kaiju) – is enjoying a rebirth. Just yesterday, Guillermo del Toro’s kaiju-inspired Pacific Rim invaded Chinese cinemas and raked in record opening ticket sales of $9 million. Meanwhile, news of Godzilla redux, set for release next May, is sparking heated chatter online, following an appearance of the film’s director Gareth Edwards at Comic-Con in San Diego last month.

In discussions and writings about the Asia Pacific, India often seems to get short shrift—despite its size, record-breaking economic growth, and growing regional and global influence. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to pose some questions to the renowned economist—as well as Columbia University professor and my CFR colleague—Jagdish Baghwati about his terrific new book with Arvind Panagariya on India, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries.

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.