The two giants of the East Asia summit, the United States and China, have both attempted to exercise soft power during the regional talks with promises of funding. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced $US600 million in aid for Indonesia, most of it for “green prosperity” in the world’s third-biggest greenhouse gas emitting nation.

Soft power and public diplomacy activities were rammed up ahead of the East Asian Summit (EAS) in Bali to lay the engagement groundwork. In Indonesia, a Department of Defence-funded integrated maritime surveillance system has just been handed over to the Indonesian government, with the US committed to supporting the programme until 2014.

An individualistic, heterogeneous, novelty-seeking American culture, strengthened by a critical mass of interdisciplinary American research universities that draw the world's best minds, represents a considerable edge in social and economic innovation.

It's a country where Shah Rukh Khan remains hugely popular. If you walk around the streets of Bali, inevitably someone will ask you if you have seen Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. The soft power of Bollywood is tangible in nooks and crannies of this vast country.

Vogue editor Anna Wintour announced a new initiative called the China Design Program. It will be a kind of cultural exchange that sends American designers to China to learn about manufacturing, marketing, and other aspects of the fashion business there—and a Chinese designer spends time in the U.S.

The award’s sponsors are professors and academics who say they are independent of the government. While the government has enthusiastically embraced the need for more robust cultural links to enhance China’s “soft power,” it wants that charm campaign to stay under the firm direction of the ruling Communist Party.

A star-studded...cultural forum that brings the likes of organic-food advocate Alice Waters, filmmaker Joel Coen and cellist Yo Yo Ma to Beijing this week...is a response to the sclerotic environment surrounding China policy in Washington D.C...a “class trip” that would create “some fund of common experience [between the two sides] where you’re not always arguing.”