It is designed to be the creative hub that catapults local film-makers towards the heights achieved by Hollywood animation giants such as Pixar and DreamWorks. China has opened a $4.5bn yuan (£420m) facility in Tianjin, near Beijing, aimed at producing films that can compete with the best of the west.

Authorities in Inner Mongolia sought to calm some of the worst ethnic strife in two decades by pledging to address concerns of the local Mongol population about the environmental costs of mining in the resource-rich region, and by announcing that a Han Chinese will be tried for murder over the death of a young Mongol man.

LinkedIn Corp. has established its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore and plans to set up a Japan office later this year, as the company seeks to grow its regional footprint. The headquarters will serve as a gateway for regional expansion, and support LindkedIn's existing operations in Australia and India.

A Chinese film festival will be launched in both Myanmar's new capital of Nay Pyi Taw and the former capital of Yangon next month under the culture exchange program of Myanmar and China. The Chinese film week, which will last from June 11 to 17, will be the first since 2006.

The Little Red Dot will become the focus of the film world when movie icons such as Tom Hanks, Oliver Stone and Zhang Ziyi descend on the city-state for the first-ever ScreenSingapore. The cinema event hopes to establish the city-state as a regional hub of the global film industry.

With Malaysia making its mark as an affordable and sophisticated healthcare hub, the Health Ministry is aiming to attract more than 437,000 tourists to experience what the local healthcare industry has to offer, by bringing in significant players to galvanize its efforts.

In 1961, a clutch of Chinese intellectuals gathered in Beijing to reminisce about a bearded poet from Bengal. They called Rabindranath Tagore a symbol of Hindi-Chini friendship and released ten translated tomes of his writing to mark his 100th birth anniversary.

Good cultural diplomacy is always drawn from the unique.  American country music is one area that projects a wholly American image of the rugged hero sitting high in the saddle or a scorned yet powerful woman singing about lost love. Country songs are about what the French would call la condition humaine, universal stories strummed on a guitar. As such, country music has a vast global appeal.