As the showdown escalated between Chinese security forces and residents of Wukan, where villagers revolted against the Chinese Communist Party, you didn’t find as much discussion of the incident in Chinese social media as you might expect. And it wasn’t only because the internet was shut off in the town.

Rarely has the Indian government discussed matters of foreign relations with its citizens. Foreign policy, for a long time in India, has remained a preserve of the elites. The only foreign policy issue that might have sparked an interest in the average Indian, is its nation’s relations with Pakistan. Furthermore, this interest might only be true for an Indian living in the North. An Indian living nearly 3,000 kilometers away from Pakistan in India’s northeast, with no historical experience, would have little interest in its country’s relationship with Pakistan.

The liberal spirit of the reform and opening era in the 1980s reinvigorated western culture in China, and the quickly marketized economy in the 1990s seized onto the holiday's profitable potential. Now, Christmas is both a commercial and fashion statement...

My office, part of the State Department’s public diplomacy efforts, was responsible for enlisting museums to assemble art exhibitions that would be presented overseas, creating cultural links and displaying art that would “tell America’s story.”

Sending pandas to Japan is a diplomatic way of boosting civil exchanges and building China's soft power said Feng Zhaokui...of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences...China gave a pair of pandas to Japan in 1972 to commemorate the normalization of bilateral relations.

Fresh economic initiatives, supplemented by cultural, educational and humanitarian exchanges, could encourage restraint by North Korea. Despite gunfire and nuclear construction, Pyongyang has continued to support North-South commercial cooperation through the free trade zone...

Many countries are trying every means possible to expand their cultural capacity. The United States, European Union member countries, Japan, Korea, and Singapore are all active players in the new-round competition in cultural soft power.

This a limit of China's projection of soft power, and maybe this is 'Chinese characteristics'. But in my view, the experiences of others show that you project your soft power not by the government, but mainly by civil society organisations.