Targeting China’s international reputation is a good place to start. Despite popular misconceptions, Beijing is actually extremely concerned about maintaining a positive image. It knows that being viewed as a pariah could bolster international moves to counter its strategic, political and economic weight. 

Two musk oxen for a pair of giant pandas. Who would make that trade? The Chinese did, when President Richard M. Nixon was on his world-changing trip to China in 1972. [...] Panda diplomacy has had a long history, but before Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing arrived in the United States (not long after Nixon returned from his trip), there hadn’t been a giant panda here for more than 20 years.

In the wake of the tragic explosions that recently shook the Chinese coastal city of Tianjin, Beijing’s flagship publication the People’s Daily published an online commentary last week titled “China Needs to Learn from the West to Work with Media in Crisis” – the loose translation of a commentary originally published in Chinese. 

In 1956, near the end of this first term, Eisenhower convened a White House conference on citizen diplomacy.  Out of that grew Sister Cities International, a non-profit organization with the mission to “promote peace through mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation – one individual, one community at a time.” [...] Durham joined the growing Sister Cities movement toward people-to-people diplomacy. 

A multi-media promotional campaign for international cultural exchange along the ancient Silk Road was launched on Sunday at the Xinjiang Pavilion Square of Tianshan Tianchi scenic spot in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. [...] Historically, Xinjiang is an important passage of interflow between Asian and European civilizations, which has played a unique role in exchanges between the East and West.

Foreign Policy has plotted the most common Chinese-language Baidu query for each European nation onto the map below. This provides a glimpse into how Chinese netizens view the peoples and countries of Europe — a continent whose industrialization once both humiliated China and inspired its admiration, and that has loomed large in the country’s imagination ever since.