The “new Silk Road” is the brainchild of Chinese State President Xi Jinping, who announced it as a major project - the Silk Road Economic Belt – during a state visit to Kazakhstan in mid-2013.

Recent developments at home and abroad suggest that Japan’s foreign policy is at a major turning point. Concrete steps are being taken to deepen the bilateral security alliance with the United States, and yet there is no national consensus on what should be done about the overconcentration of US bases in Okinawa. [...] The thrust of public diplomacy in the postwar years was to project an image of Japan that was not militarist. 

Mao Zedong was said to have been moved to tears when he watched an early performance of "The White-Haired Girl," an opera created to meet his call for rousing revolutionary art. And under President Xi Jinping, a revival is on the road, reinvented once more to appeal to a Communist Party leader's stringently ideological tastes.

Last week it came to light that Beijing’s state-run China Radio International secretly owns 60% of a U.S. company, G&E Studio, which leases stations and airtime in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, among other cities. Beijing uses similar subterfuges in Europe and Australia. 

The development of various ethnic communities in Kunming, capital city of China's Southwestern Yunnan province, has tremendously strengthened the unity and harmonious co-existence of ethnic groups. Kunming is home to 52 ethnic groups, including Yi, Hui, Dai, Bai, Miao and so on. 

The leaders of China and Taiwan meet Saturday in Singapore for the first time since the two sides clashed in a civil war seven decades ago, in a carefully managed encounter that caps eight years of improved economic ties.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who wooed Nepalis on his two visits last year, during which he promoted his “neighborhood first” diplomacy, is now an object of scorn. Some people have burned effigies of him, and a #BackoffIndia hashtag was recently trending on Twitter. While Nepal’s allies, including China, welcomed the new Constitution, India merely “noted” it.