China's hydropower plans are a test of its avowed good neighbourliness...

The Government is using "rugby diplomacy" - sending former All Blacks to China - to strengthen trade links...The initiative was the brainchild of Sports Minister Murray McCully, who calls it "rugby diplomacy". "In the context of our overall relationship with China, which is going places quickly, it's one of those areas where we can underpin the growth of trade and economic relations," Mr McCully said.

When I entered the US Pavilion at the 2010 World’s Exposition in Shanghai, I anticipated the presentation of the nation’s character to its predominately Chinese audience and hoped to deconstruct its message. I wondered what virtues, ideas, personas, landmarks and struggles would, in the brief experience of Expo, encapsulate the entity I have dedicated my career to studying.

Recent ambitious global expansion maneuvers by China's State media have brought both acclaim and suspicion, especially in Western nations, whose observation of the Chinese media landscape has been mostly shaped by their understanding of State-owned media.

A superpower is generally understood to be a nation, empire, or civilization that can project power globally; that is, a nation that possesses economic, political and cultural or "soft" power along with overwhelming military or "hard" power. It's certainly not hard to appreciate China's emerging economic power.

These videos are part of the series CPD Video Conversations: National Branding at Expo 2010 Shanghai.

>> For viewers in China, follow this link to watch the video

Ideas and good writing may be fun, good music can be soothing, the cinema and theater are certainly entertaining, and sports and video games are heart-racing. All that is good and well, and all are the flesh and blood of the soft power that many countries try to build and whose management the United States has possibly mastered.

While European leaders squabbled over the right kind of deficit reduction and whose country boasts the finest football side, Barack Obama used the recent G20 summit of leading economic powers in Toronto to make a different case: that the United States is dedicated to building a closer relationship with Asia.