SHANGHAI --- Zhao Qizeng, China’s leading proponent of public diplomacy, wrote, “Culture is the soul and life of a nation.” That concept is the driving force behind much of China’s exercise of soft power, and other countries that deal with this superpower need to understand the value the Chinese place on their language, traditions, and other cultural elements of their national life.

As people in Santa Lucija, a village in the small island nation of Malta, look forward to its annual Chinese Film Festival this summer, the China Cultural Center in Malta has pledged to organize more cultural events this year to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Santa Lucija, the only Maltese village with a partnership with Jinchang district of Suzhou city in east China, began to offer its citizens a feast for their eyes in 2007 when it organized a Chinese film festival at the end of the summer.

On May 30, the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS) at Brookings hosted a discussion examining the use of public diplomacy in Northeast Asia. Leading experts discussed the objectives, practices, opportunities and challenges in public diplomacy for China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

During the 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, and after a unipolar moment for the United States, China has emerged as the newest superpower. All its predecessors at this exalted level, going back even before Rome, have established their positions by amassing formidable military strength. But China is going about matters differently.

The extreme nationalist vitriol comes from Yang Rui, an anchor on China's flagship English-language news and interview program, Dialogue. Cultural products like the English-language Dialogue have been developed in recent years as part of a major Chinese Communist Party attempt to bolster China's cultural soft power internationally.

The AMC purchase marks the start of what Wanda executives and Chinese officials hope will be an aggressive expansion into Western markets. An article in the state-run propaganda outlet “People’s Daily,” meanwhile, touted aspirations of "exporting the culture" and the regime’s “Going Global” strategy.

He impressed the interviewers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which ranked 35th among all U.S. universities, with his 'soft power,' and was admitted to its undergraduate biomedical engineering program, which ranked second in the country. In addition, he won a quarter scholarship.