APDS Blogger: Sarah Myers

In January 2013, a group of nine Masters’ of Public Diplomacy students will embark on a trip to Beijing, China. A mixture of native Chinese and Americans, we hope to accomplish an ambitious set of goals: to gain an understanding of how public diplomacy is thought about and engaged in academic contexts as well as how it is innovatively used in practice—through film, at airports, over the Internet, in media, and by corporations.

Concern lingers within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that China could use its widening trade and investment ties as a political tool, and Japan needs to regain its soft power through more non-economic engagement with the region, experts from Southeast Asia said at a recent symposium in Tokyo.

China is expected to overtake the US as the world's largest economy a few years before 2030, while the US will remain the top player in the following two decades thanks to its dominant role in international politics, its technological prowess and its soft power that attracts outsiders, said the latest report released on Monday by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC).

“We have carried out extensive public diplomacy activities as well as cultural and people-to-people exchanges to encourage deeper understanding and friendship between the Chinese people and people of other countries.”

In 2002, Blackwell founded a company called Killerspin, based in Chicago. The idea came to him when he was asked to help host a table tennis exhibition in Chicago in the early 2000s, an event meant to celebrate the anniversary of the good-natured exchange of table tennis players between the U.S. and China later known, of course, as Ping Pong Diplomacy.

China is not squeamish about putting a price and index on its culture. In a quirky development last month, China launched its first cultural industry index at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange... The OCT Index, which as of now hasn’t generated much notice, does signal a shifting trend - China’s determination to change its growth model.