I don’t often get the impression that I am hallucinating. But I do distinctly remember wondering whether my eyes were playing tricks on me, when I went for a late night stroll in Shanghai, eighteen months ago, and came across the Barbie store.

There was so much to take in. It was five-stories high. It was decked out in Barbie’s trademark garish pink. And it was open – at 11pm at night.  I read in today’s FT that the flagship Barbie store in Shanghai is now closing. I wasn’t the victim of some mind-altering drug, after all – but I can’t vouch for the person who thought of opening the store in the first place.

By Daniel Dombey, US Diplomatic Correspondent

Few things on this planet are as important as US-Chinese relations, since between them the two countries do so much to shape world events. So Robert Gates’ extended trip to Beijing, dealing with some of the most difficult aspects of that relationship – their burgeoning military rivalry and their fledgling cooperation on security issues – is a pretty significant event.

Watching the Chinese government’s reaction to the award today of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, I can only conclude that it needs to hire a new PR agency.

The government is outraged by the suggestion that it is a repressive regime that does not respect human rights. So how does it react to the Nobel ceremony today? It rounds up dissidents all over the country. It launches it own rival Confucius Prize for peace -only to find that even the Taiwanese politician awarded the prize appears to be bemused by it. It turns the decision over whether countries will send ambassadors to the Nobel ceremony into a crude trial of strength with the West – and rounds up a veritable rogues’ gallery of authoritarians in support of its position: Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia. Terrific.