What are the implications of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank for the next U.S. president? (...) Currently, 57 countries are confirmed founding members. The United States stands alone.Critics of the U.S. decision not to join see Washington sidelined as allies jump on the AIIB bandwagon. 

Peng Liyuan, the celebrity wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, has played a key role in successfully projecting the Communist giant's soft power abroad through her public diplomacy, according to a study on the country's first lady.

Despite China’s impressive build-up of hard power from its manufacturing industry to an ever-increasing number of fighter jets and submarines, the country’s soft power or its inherent cultural or ideological appeal is in short supply. Many people remain suspicious or even fearful of a resurgent China.

Yet it seems that the Chinese are the most devoted students of Nye. In fact it is not too much of an exaggeration to say the Chinese have become obsessed with soft power.

For Australia, a key focus of its foreign policy should be how to balance its economic ties with China and its cultural ties with the United States; appeasing both without getting in the middle of an ugly tug-o-war that forces Canberra to take sides.

How are states employing cultural diplomacy in an increasingly interconnected world in shaping understanding between societies while promoting preferential co-operation between nations? Observers of China-South Africa relations will have noticed the increasing reference to the 'China Year in South Africa' by officials on both sides.

The creation of the prosaic-sounding Asian Infrastructure Investment Development Bank (AIIB) has landed the biggest blow to America’s superpower status in the post-war era.  Such is the verdict of former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, one of the West's foremost public intellectuals and a man whose voice reverberates around the corridors of the world’s chancellories.  

Surpassing France, China has become the third largest destination for international students in 2014. According to the latest figures from the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are over 337,000 international students studying in the mainland, which account for 8 percent of all international students across the world.