From June 16 to 23, the city of Shanghai will be host to the 16th annual Shanghai International Film Festival, an international platform for foreign filmmakers to connect with audiences in the world’s fastest growing film market. The festival’s main programs will include an awards ceremony, a professional film trade gathering of international producers, distributors, and buyers, a forum featuring lectures by industry professionals, and international film screenings.

This soft-power deficit could prove a big headache for the new Chinese president because there is increasing international concern, suspicion and even outright hostility as China's international role expands. In the U.S., for example, the public's favorable attitude toward China fell by more than one-fifth in one year — to 40 percent in 2012 from 51 percent in 2011 — according to Pew Global Research Projects.

China’s President Xi may not have talked about his dream --- what he calls the “China Dream”--- during his first “face-to-face” talks with U.S. President Obama, but some perceptive China watchers and analysts have written about its meaning and implications for all countries of the world.

A second issue to address is that, traditionally, there has been too little emphasis from China on public diplomacy efforts to reach out directly to foreign publics. Instead, Beijing has often placed emphasis, especially in Africa and the Middle East, on improving working relationships with strategically important governments through assistance programs that may not always serve the interest of local peoples. This is now changing. China has rapidly developed public diplomacy skills and policies. But more change is urgently needed if hearts and minds are to be won across the world.

As a non-profit public institution, the Confucius Institute links up with worldwide universities, colleges and secondary schools providing teachers and materials for their Chinese education at different levels. The conference, held in the first higher-learning institute established in the Western world in 1088, gathered the heads of 72 Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms from all over Europe. The Old Continent can be considered "mature" for the institution's development, Xu said.

In Beijing, the country’s leadership was recognizing the importance of soft power. Meanwhile in Hollywood, DreamWorks was given the green light to a movie called Kung Fu Panda. I would love to tell you that we did this as part of a very shrewd strategy to gain entrée into China. It wasn’t. We just liked the idea of a film about a panda who wants to do kung fu.

Western critics tend to focus on the media and cultural components of this push while ignoring the rest. At a time when anxious prognostications about China’s rise dominate media headlines, deriding China’s soft-power strategy -- in particular, its failure to grasp the global appeal of the free press and the free market -- has become a popular act of reassurance for Western academics and media analysts.

Professor Zhou Qingan, who teaches public diplomacy and global communications at Tsinghua University, said the Chinese public had high expectations of their leader's overseas trips. "The Chinese people hope that Xi will defend China's national interests during diplomatic occasions unswervingly, and [during the press briefing with President Obama], Xi did express himself in a frank manner,"