Katherine Ryder | Writing Portfolio

FORTUNE — Unlike Google (GOOG), Baidu, China’s largest search engine, cooperates with the government’s policy of censorship. The western press commonly asks the company’s CEO, Robin Li, how he justifies such a decision. Li’s responses are generally quite deferential to the government. An unfavorable onlooker might even consider some of his rhetoric to veer precariously close to pandering. Take, for instance, Li’s dictum on big tech in China: “…walking the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics is the well-spring of strength that will allow the Chinese Internet to continue its healthy and rapid development.”

So it came as quite a surprise when CCTV, one of the government’s many state-run media organizations, aired a damning 26-minute documentary on Li’s company last month. Millions of Chinese viewers watched footage of a Baidu (BIDU) employee helping a man posing as the owner of what he admitted to be a sham healthcare company buy a fraudulent advertisement for a phony weight-loss pill. For weeks, the media speculated on the rationale behind the attack, which struck many as particularly harsh. Was the government getting uncomfortable with Baidu’s monopoly on the search market? (It controls about 80% of the market.) Or was CCTV acting out of commercial opportunism, since the broadcaster is also developing a search engine of its own? Did someone at CCTV have a personal vendetta against a higher-up at Baidu? (Read full article here.)

FORTUNE — Singapore’s government has a way of getting what it wants. Fertility rates too low? The Social Development Unit organizes boat-trips to spin romance among the singles crowd. Not enough tourism? The Tourism Board spearheads the development of two casinos and undertakes construction of a massive new sports complex. Too many students studying abroad? The government sponsors Yale to open a campus in Singapore in 2013. Indeed, the Singapore government has been so successful in its social and economic engineering efforts that the World Economic Forum recently ranked the city-state second only to Switzerland in its annual global competitiveness survey.

Having mastered efficiency, Singapore’s new pet project is creativity. The country has long had its eyes on Silicon Valley and over the last decade it has implemented plans to more or less recreate the California tech scene in Southeast Asia. At first, Singapore attempted to throw billions of dollars at venture capitalists and private equity firms. Then, seeing too little of that money trickling down to startups, it began funding them more directly. In its latest scheme, the government plans $50 million of direct investment in 100 companies over five years. (Read full article here.)

FORTUNE —  Renminbi sold at a bank near you? Perhaps not immediately, but a push to open up overseas trading of China’s notoriously restricted currency does seem to be underway.

In a late-April move that drew significant attention, Singapore bid to become the first offshore trading hub for China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), outside Hong Kong and Mainland China. The announcement follows China’s decision last summer to allow the currency to be bought and sold in Hong Kong, and a similar move in January that paved the way for a Chinese bank to trade renminbi in New York.

Together, the three announcements weave a complicated story of shifting economic and political realities. (Read full article here.)