Some $A500 million in Chinese investment has seen a sevenfold increase in lithium mines in WA.

Since the Trans-Pacific Partnership's demise was first promised by US President Donald Trump in 2016, policymakers and businesses across the Asia-Pacific have been looking more seriously to the China-led Regional Cooperative Economic Partnership - especially given China’s refusal to join a rejigged US-free TPP.

The US is Australia’s top investor, not China. What impact will that have on the Australian economy in January when Donald Trump becomes President? BlueNotes looks at US investment in Australia and how this fits into the Asian Century.

Western Australia has been hit with a sharp economic downturn as the Australian economy adjusts to the transition away from the mining boom. The top-ranked state economy in Australia just two years ago, WA now sits at number seven, above only struggling Tasmania.

Communist Vietnam has changed its attitudes to the LGBTI (lesbian gay bisexual transgender intersex) community in recent years, from condemning it to allowing gay weddings, pride parades and transgender people to change their gender on identity cards.

We've had an internet of things for a decade and pretty soon we'll have a big data set of everything, too. Combine those with insects and you get a particularly ambitious and impressive Australian CSIRO-led global project essentially studying the big data of bees. Why? Because they continue to die in record numbers and we still don't know why.

We are in the Asian Century but what does that mean? For Australia, there is a challenge in simply recognising the importance of understanding Asia and the varied cultures and the languages. But what is Australia's real understanding of the region and is it greater than it might have been 20 or 30 years ago?

America and Vietnam celebrated 20 years of the normalisation of relations on the July 11. The two nations have seen rare closeness in recent years including recent Vietnam visits by former US President Bill Clinton and US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.