The China Institute will hold its annual gala today, celebrating the 88th year since its founding in 1926 and making it the oldest US-China cultural organization in the United States.  The China Institute in Manhattan was established by American and Chinese educators, including John Dewey, Hu Shih, president of Peking University and China's ambassador to the US, and Kuo Pingwen, founder of the National Southeastern University in China.

With labor costs rising rapidly in China, American manufacturers of all sizes are looking south to Mexico with what economists describe as an eagerness not seen since the early years of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s.

President Barack Obama is set to take his boldest step to halt the rise of the oceans and stop the warming of the planet. It won’t be enough unless the rest of the world follows. Trimming carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 25 percent in coming decades, as Obama is said to be proposing, would be more than overwhelmed by increases in China andIndia where coal-fired power plants are springing up and new cars are rolling out of showrooms.

By 2020, it's estimated more than 200 million Chinese will go overseas - double the number that did so last year. "It has been one of the biggest dreams for Chinese travelers to go outside and travel overseas," says Chen Xu, a Beijing-based researcher at the Chinese Tourism Academy, a government think-tank that studies tourism trends." And now the government has lifted restrictions on outbound travel, so for more Chinese, it's much easier to travel abroad."

A group of U.S. lawmakers is seeking to overhaul the country's international news and programming broadcasts, saying they should be consistent with and supportive of the country's foreign policy objectives.  Royce said Wednesday the reorganization is necessary to bolster U.S. broadcasting in the face of growing competition from Russian, Chinese and other foreign international broadcasters.

A model apartment is opening this week at the Baccarat Hotel and Residences, a 50-story tower under development on West 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, across from the Museum of Modern Art. Singapore-based Pontiac Land Group is joining with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Hines to construct a 72-story condo tower on the same block. Farther east, China Vanke Co., China’s biggest publicly traded developer, is working with Aby Rosen’s RFR Holding LLC on a 61-story building on Lexington Avenue.

Each fall, thousands of students from South Korea arrive on American campuses. They come from a culture that views education as the key to success, where mothers and fathers save to send their children overseas. Recently however, after years of robust enrollment increases, graduate applications from South Korea to American colleges have fallen off; and last year the number of South Korean undergraduates in the United States also dropped. Fewer South Koreans study in the United States now than did five years ago.

China's most celebrated sage has become the emblem of the country's soft-power drive and of its people-to-people diplomacy in Africa. Todd Balazovic reports.In Africa, it's Chinese businesspeople who sign multimillion-dollar deals, top politicians who sign major cooperation agreements and people who embody China's most famous thinker who act as cultural ambassadors.