The soft-launch ceremony of the first-ever mobile newspaper in sub-Saharan Africa, Xinhua Mobile Newspaper, is held on Tuesday in Nairobi, Kenya, which enables about 17 million Kenyan mobile subscribers to receive news from China’s Xinhua News Agency via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).

Chinese Foreign Ministry's newly-registered microblog has drawn considerable attention at home, marking the government's latest efforts to connect to some of China's 457 million Internet users through increasingly popular web services.

Indian bureaucracy needs to take some lessons on public diplomacy from their Western counterparts, and the same is the case with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Office. With corruption becoming a key rallying point, the extra-sensitive PMO mandarins ensured that the electronic media was booted out of the onboard media from the PM's recent trip to China

In a post made to his Chinese-language weblog on April 15, Ezzat Shahrour, chief correspondent for al-Jazeera Arabic in Beijing, voiced his frustration with Chinese state media reporting on the upheaval in the Arab world this year.

The importance of people-to-people relations in disaster diplomacy shouldn’t be underestimated -- beneath the prickly problems of diplomacy and defence in the Sino-Japan relationship lay deep layers of people-to-people relationships.

If public diplomacy helps determine which countries are on the way up and which are on the way down, U.S. actions speak louder than the broadcasts themselves. "We are in an information war, and we are losing that war," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to Congress last month.

The decision to cut Voice of America (VOA) Broadcasting to China has attracted a good deal of congressional attention, as well it should. While China has launched a worldwide public diplomacy and media offensive, the United States is looking at a greatly reduced international media presence if the projected cuts go through.

The United States administration has rebranded the country's foreign policy around the grand concept of "smart power", an expression which envelops great confidence if not self-satisfaction, and which, to a certain extent, presupposes a strategic dominance.