Delicious food and a piano recital by the highly acclaimed Chinese pianist Yundi Li opened the Experience China event in Japan on Monday..."The event is expected to serve as a window through which Japanese people can see a whole picture of China that is separated from their country only by a narrow strip of water," Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Information Office.

This collaborative work is making the case that effective cultural diplomacy need not aspire to control the message. It is not best deployed when closely linked to the priorities of policy makers or defined national interests. Nor is it always desirable for acts of cultural diplomacy to be framed in terms of the goal of the representation of a people.

While taking part in an energetic three-day convening at Georgetown University dedicated to “Global Performance, Civic Imagination, and Cultural Diplomacy,” it became clear that the meeting was itself evidence for the continued emergence of a global network linking artists, performers, cultural policy makers, human rights activists, social justice advocates, academics, diplomacy practitioners, and others in international affairs, all variously pursuing new intersections of the arts with cu

The Confucius Institute has now been established for eight years, and there is a new global wave of interest in studying Putonghua. Nowadays, Chinese society realizes the cultural power of Confucianism, and Confucius' name constantly comes up in the context of Chinese culture.

Lu Cairong, deputy director of China International Publishing Group (CIPG) said at the opening ceremony that friendly exchanges between Esperanto circles of the two countries have helped boost bilateral people-to-people exchanges, and served as a unique way to promote bilateral ties.

Some people say we're trying to export Chinese films to the United States," he said. "That does not reflect our real thinking. What Chinese films lack is content and concepts, not [distribution] channels. The U.S., especially Hollywood, is so strong for film production. So if we're going to produce films, we need to work together.

Lost in such big-hearted diplomacy is the fact that India is downriver to China rejects the very concept of water sharing...Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers shows that China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.