Brilliant sunshine coming up in Shanghai. Warm, sweet spring. Good weather to go out on. We fly soon. As I go…

Every week we hit the news on Friday. This week we do it from China. Things look different when you’re sitting in Shanghai. The pope’s visit to America? Invisible. The Dalai Lama in the U.S.? Big. CNN’s Jack Cafferty and his offhand taunt toward China? Huge. You wouldn’t believe the rumpus.

We’ve got Olympic politics, a once hot market in trouble, a party boss going down, and Tibet all over…

Once upon a time, just a few decades ago, the United States saw Communist China as a revolutionary threat, but a revolution with barefoot soldiers.

Then came China’s opening, and the U.S. saw a billion Chinese customers. It turns out, Americans were the big customers. Now China is getting rich, and, some say, leading a revolution in the whole world order — away from the West. Away from the American era, American values, American power. That’s big.

It seems like only yesterday that American scholar Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay “The End of History” after the fall of the Soviet Union. What most people took away from his essay was this: The global battle over the best great system was over. Liberal democracy and market dynamics had won.

Well, China only got half that memo…

If you stroll through the old French Concession in Shanghai — where Imperial China ceded control to the French a century and more ago — you’ll come upon, of all things, a vigorous tie to Boston…

The terrible story behind the story of China’s economic boom is the astounding environmental devastation that has come with it. China’s air, China’s rivers, even China’s seas, are deadly and dying. Half a billion Chinese do not have access to safe drinking water.

Problem is, the boom and the environmental crisis are two sides of the same coin — and growth-hungry China doesn’t want to let that coin go…

People’s Square, in the middle of Shanghai, is not like Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Shanghai’s square is huge — but green. It feels in April a bit like Central Park.

A few months ago something extraordinary—for China—happened here. Thousands of people marched into People’s Square to protest the extension of a high-speed Maglev train line through their neighborhood — and the protest worked. The project was dropped. In China, that’s news. Almost amazing. Because most dissenters in China face a much grimmer outcome…

A lot of China’s economic boom — and you could argue, all of it — has been built on the backs of migrant workers drawn from the poor interior of the country to the coastal beehive of industry and export.