Vice-President Xi Jinping's trip to the United States this year is expected to be an opportunity to further promote public diplomacy between the two countries, as more US citizens have positive views on China, a US embassy spokesman said on Thursday.

The year-long series will conclude in the winter, the ambassador said. "Sports, movies, animation and cartoons, music and youth exchanges are among the priorities campaigned by both sides" to promote public diplomacy, Niwa said.

Guangzhou's new Waqqas Mosque is one of many of China's recent forays into Islamic infrastructure -- a market that promises to earn Beijing as much in soft power with the resource-rich Muslim world as it does contract revenues.

...Hu told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to invest more in its soft power resources. Accordingly, China is spending billions of dollars on a charm offensive. The Chinese style emphasises high-profile gestures, such as rebuilding the Cambodian Parliament or Mozambique's foreign affairs ministry.

For all its efforts to enhance the soft power, China has had a limited return on its investment. The development of soft power need not be a zero sum game. All countries can gain from finding attraction in one anothers’ cultures. But for China to succeed, it will need to unleash the talents of its civil society. Unfortunately, that does not seem about to happen soon.

An online film festival titled "Weeks of Chinese Cinema" was launched in St Kliment Ohridski university on Monday. According to the Chinese Ambassador to Bulgaria, the goal of the project was to use cinema and the internet to open a window to Chinese culture and create a better understanding of contemporary China.

The new Washington operation will be a hub of CCTV's global news-gathering operations to compete with international broadcasters such as CNN, the BBC and al-Jazeera. To use news reporting and cultural programming, China aims to advance its “soft power,” or cultural influence, making it commensurate with the nation’s growing economic might.