American universities are enrolling unprecedented numbers of foreign students, prompted by the rise of an affluent class in China and generous scholarships offered by oil-rich Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia.

In China, there has been a trend recently to use Sun Tzu and The Art of War as a source of soft power for China’s peaceful development strategy. This trend is present in the 2014 9th International Symposium on Sun Tzu’s Art of War hosted by the Chinese Academy of Military Science titled “Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Peace, Coopberation and Development.” 

 After a slew of negative opinion polls, China is working to improve its global image. A global opinion poll by WorldPublicOpion.org found that public views of China have declined. Another poll – conducted by the Pew Research Center - found that United States’ global image remains more positive than China’s.

China's new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a very big deal for Asia's economic future, but the way its establishment has played out makes it an even bigger deal for Asia's changing political and strategic order. And Canberra's announcement last weekend that Australia will join the AIIB despite the objections of the United States may come to be seen as marking a  historic shift in Australian foreign policy.

The Chinese government provides hundreds of thousands of pounds and more than 90 teachers to schools across the UK as part of a Chinese-language teaching project. An investigation by campaign group Free Tibet found that British educational institutions are hosting so-called Confucius Classrooms without prior discussion of their content. Critics argue the language classes present students with a “whitewashed” view of China’s government and human rights record.

Japan’s government is paying to have Japanese-language nonfiction books translated into English, with the first works to be produced under the program arriving in American libraries this month. The move is one of several nontraditional public-relations steps by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, which is trying to enhance Japan’s profile among U.S. opinion leaders and the general public as it engages in a public relations battle with China and South Korea.

Just a few days shy of China’s end-of-March deadline for founding membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Australia confirmed that it will join the AIIB. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government announced over the weekend that it had chosen to sign on to join the bank as a founding member, becoming the latest U.S.-allied state to join an institution that some in the United States see as a competitor to U.S.-led international financial institutions, like the World Bank.