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,"

Chen Mingming, a member of China's foreign ministry's Public Diplomacy Advisory Panel, said China and the US do not have substantial disputes when dealing with issues on the Korean Peninsula.

Ruan Zongze, a deputy director of the China Institute of International Studies, said the cyber security issue has been exacerbated by the US military, business and intelligence fields, and the two sides need to establish a mechanism for negotiations while maintaining their own cyber security defenses.

The Chinese Communist Party does not hide its hostility to and fear of the political values -- freedom, human rights, political competition, and constitutional rule -- that underpin American democracy. In the eyes of the Chinese ruling elites, the United States presents a political threat, even though they understand that a full-fledged military conflict between two nuclear-armed great powers is extremely unlikely. Chinese leaders feel so endangered by U.S. soft power that they are now even orchestrating a propaganda campaign against constitutionalism.

The mirror image of this issue is that traditionally, there has been too little emphasis from Beijing upon public diplomacy programmes to reach out to foreign publics directly. Rather than winning hearts and minds in this way, Beijing has tended to place emphasis, especially in Africa and the Middle East, on improving working relationships with strategically important governments through assistance programmes that may not always serve the interest of local people.

No-one has been more skeptical about Chinese soft power than Joseph Nye, the man who first coined the phrase twenty years ago. In particular, Nye has criticized Beijing’s efforts to acquire soft power through centralized schemes, like the spread of Confucius Institutes or the establishment at the end of last year of the China Public Diplomacy Association. Despite “spending billions of dollars to increase its soft power … China has had a limited return on its investment,” he recently argued.

lle Obama has already made support of the 100,000 Strong Initiative, which aims to send more American students to China, a core part of her international agenda. "Studying in countries like China isn't only about your prospects in the global marketplace," she said in 2011. "It's also about whether you can come together, and work together with them to make our world stronger."

Asked whether it was effective to deal with the issue by publicly naming China, Hagel said he thought both public diplomacy and private engagement were necessary. Public statements are necessary to let people know what is going on, he said, but it doesn't solve problems.