When landslides devastated parts of Tajikistan’s Khatlon province in early 2009, the village of Baldzhuvan was better prepared than most.

United States (US) President Donald Trump grabs the most headlines, but the cult of the strongman leader is most developed in Asia. The continent abounds with rulers – including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the strongest of them all, Chinese President Xi Jinping – who make a virtue of centralising power.Obviously, leadership styles vary.

Five years ago, China’s leaders decided to target modern state governance as a top reform priority. The goal of such reform is to improve the state’s capacity to adapt to the sheer size and increasing complexity of the Chinese economy, and to mitigate risk. Achieving this objective will not be easy.To understand why, and what it will take to succeed, consider how Chinese governance has worked in recent decades.

On a recent official visit to China, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad criticized his host country’s use of major infrastructure projects – and difficult-to-repay loans – to assert its influence over smaller countries.

On 10 December, 1948, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, affirming the view that “the will of the people” – democracy – should form the basis of any government. But seven decades later, the world’s democracies are in peril. After a fourfold increase in the number of democracies between the end of World War II and 2000, we are now in a sustained period of political regression.

Next month, the United States (US) Department of the Treasury is due to submit to Congress its biannual report detailing which countries, if any, are manipulating their currencies to gain an unfair trade advantage. For his part, President Donald Trump is already accusing China of doing so, as he did throughout the 2016 election campaign. And he is reportedly trying to influence the Treasury Department’s deliberations.What has changed since the last report in April?

It was just a century ago that the Spanish flu epidemic spread across the world and killed tens of millions of people. Long before the moon landing, the Internet, or the discovery of the Higgs boson, the world was at the mercy of a disease that struck indiscriminately and did not respect national boundaries. The epidemic required an absolutely extraordinary response.A hundred years on, contagious diseases continue to cross borders faster and more efficiently than people or goods.

One day in 1961, an American economist named Daniel Ellsberg stumbled across a piece of paper with apocalyptic implications.

After years of ill health, the news industry is finally showing signs of a modest recovery. According to the Digital News Report 2018 – the most comprehensive survey of digital media consumption – subscriptions are trending up while consumer confidence has stabilized.

As digital technologies and automation have advanced, fears about workers’ futures have increased. But, the end result does not have to be negative. The key is education.Already, robots are taking over a growing number of routine and repetitive tasks, putting workers in some sectors under serious pressure. In South Korea, which has the world’s highest density of industrial robots – 631 per 10,000 workers – manufacturing employment is declining, and youth unemployment is high.