On a recent Saturday afternoon, Ikea's flagship mainland store - one of the world's largest - is abuzz with people. Walkways guiding visitors from one showroom to the next feel more congested than the road outside, and almost all 660 seats in the canteen are occupied. Yet the lines to the cashiers are refreshingly short - most are not here to shop.

When President Daniel Ortega granted a Chinese telecommunications executive exclusive rights to develop a $40 billion canal through Nicaragua and operate it for 100 years, his administration touted the CEO's record of success heading a wireless communications firm with projects in 20 countries. Wang Jing's company, Xinwei, boasted that it had orchestrated an array of deals worth more than $5 billion over the last three years, in places as far-flung as Zimbabwe and Ukraine.

The Philippines and Japan’s charm offensives towards China appear to have failed as Beijing seeks to isolate both powers within the region. In recent weeks both the Philippines and Japan have made a number of overtures to China aimed at mending strained bilateral ties. Just this week, for instance, the chief of staff of the Philippine military, Emmanuel Bautista, pledged that his country would continue its no-confrontation doctrine in the South China Sea, while also saying that it would consider allowing Chinese naval ships to use the Subic port.

A month after arriving in Hong Kong, the United States’ consul general is getting a crash course in the city’s linguistics. In his first Facebook post introducing himself to local residents, Clifford Hart—a veteran diplomat who has served multiple tours in China—declared that he was thrilled to be the U.S.’s consul general in the former British colony, and was “look[ing] forward to finding out the things that make us alike, rather than different.”

In a symbolic move, the Chinese government would appear to have made their conquest of Tibet nearly complete. Hongai village, the exiled Dalai Lama’s ancestral home that rests on a mountain peak, is receiving a 2.5 million yuan makeover in the form of redevelopment. The house where Tibet’s spiritual leader grew up is not to be spared. The structure is now surrounded by a three-meter high wall and is being watched by security cameras. The Dalai Lama’s boyhood home is the final physical spot in the mainland dedicated to the man whom Beijing calls a “wolf in monk’s robes.”

So China — as in, the People’s Republic of — is really into the Little Mermaid, and not that saccharine Disney cartoon we feed our tumescent American children. The Hans Christian Andersen fairytale is apparently a huge deal in China, so much so that Denmark has been able to establish a strong diplomatic relationship with China almost entirely through the famous bronze Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

It often seems the more well-known a concept becomes, the less it is understood. Such was the case with Francis Fukuyama’s End of History theory, which proclaimed—quite accurately thus far— that the end of the Cold War was also the end of the Hegelian dialectic struggles between opposing universalistic worldviews. With communism and fascism discredited that world was left with only one remaining self-proclaimed universal ideology, that of liberal democracy.

I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, and for me the star turn at this year's Edinburgh International Festival was the Beijing People's Art Theatre's production of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus." This was Chinese “soft power” at its best. The play was well chosen. Strangely, for a play written four hundred years ago when England was still an absolute monarchy, "Coriolanus" is a critique of democracy, set in ancient republican Rome, as England had never experienced such a thing.