China’s effort to project soft-power has suffered another serious setback after a second US university in a week announced it would close its on-campus Confucius Institute because of an apparent disagreement over Chinese government controls.

On the surface, the turmoil in Hong Kong is caused by Beijing’s decision regarding general elections. In reality, the deep sources of the conflict are not so different from the recent large-scale outbreaks of social tensions in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan.

Peking University has formed a research center dedicated to national "soft power," aiming to help the government spread Chinese culture and values abroad.  "Cultural soft power is beginning to offer strong support for the rise of China. The country must enhance its cultural strength in order to dominate the global contest for soft power."

A 21-member troupe of Chinese artists from Soochow University in southeastern China's Suzhou City has performed a variety of Chinese arts here and triggered zeal from Cambodian spectators.

A cultural relationship that started in 1999 was celebrated on Thursday night in southwest China.  Montana governor Steve Bullock and Guangxi governor Chen Wu took down the cover of the ceremonial wall of friendship between the two locations.

China’s soft-diplomacy push hit a speed bump this week when the University of Chicago decided to pull the plug on renewing a controversial Beijing-funded Confucius Institute.The decision may prompt other universities to rethink their relationships with Confucius institutes – attractive because they offer free Chinese-language classes and cultural programs to cash-strapped colleges in the United States, albeit with limitations on what they can teach.

If there was something threatening about the incursion of Western cultural and political influence ten years ago, the China of today seems a bit more confident about its standing in the world. Not that this newfound swagger has supplanted the paranoic tendencies inherent to authoritarian rule...

For the first time in years, Japan and China held high-level talks on maritime issues aimed at easing tensions over disputes in the East China Sea, a move which analyst James Brown views as a significant positive step.Yi Xianliang, deputy director-general of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs met with his Japanese counterpart Makita Shimokawa, in the eastern Chinese coastal city of Qingdao on September 24-25, according to China's state-run news agency Xinhua. The meeting marked the first high-level bilateral talks on maritime affairs since May 2012.