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.

Recent tensions over cyber espionage and the South China Sea have brought out areas of disagreement in U.S.-China relations.  And yet, even as the U.S. and China trade barbs over these issues, they are stepping up their cooperation on a problem of global significance: climate change

One topic that greatly interests Nye is the rise of China. With a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and military spending as it moves out of a period of intense engagement in the Middle East, the threat of China as a peer competitor has loomed large in the thoughts of American policymakers. John Mearshimer, Nye’s intellectual sparring partner, claims that this geopolitical shift eastward, and an increasingly assertive China, is bound to lead to greater tension, and an “inevitable US-Chinese conflict”.

In a "symbolic blow to U.S. global financial hegemony," China and Russia have agreed to a 30-year, $400 billion gas deal that will provide China with the energy it needs to keep its economy growing and Russia with much-needed capital. And it's all in domestic currencies, bypassing the dollar entirely. Ten years in the making, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the deal an "epochal event" and proclaimed that both countries were very satisfied with the terms.Thirty-eight billion cubic meters of gas will flow from Russia to China.

Other countries are distorted by their failure to come to terms with brutal realities of their history. So are we.Listen to the next discussion you hear of tensions between Japan and two of its neighbors, South Korea and China. You'll hear again and again that an important root problem is Japan's difficulty in coming to terms with its history of wartime aggression in China and use of Korean "comfort women" as sex slaves for its troops.

According to The Japan Times, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters on Monday that Japanese and North Korean diplomats will meet in Stockholm on May 26-28 to discuss a wide range of issues, including North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese citizens and its nuclear and ballistic missile program.The meeting is noteworthy, Clint rightly noted, mainly in that it is being held in Europe instead of Asia. The two sides usually hold their bilateral meetings in Asia, particularly China.

Early on Wednesday morning, Malaysian officials were on hand to welcome two important new arrivals to Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The pair, Ms. Feng Yi and Mr. Fu Wa, are on a diplomatic mission from China, hoping to cement the relationship between the two states and help them get past the considerable trauma caused to that relationship by the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.