The Chinese team that got into a nasty brawl with Georgetown University players in an exhibition game went to the Beijing airport Friday to reconcile with them. A brief statement from Georgetown said coach John Thompson III...

A trained opera singer, he is one of 20 young foreign vocalists in Beijing this summer to learn how to sing opera in a new language: Mandarin. It's a daunting task that culminated Thursday night with a performance at the National Center for Performing Arts...

US vice president Joe Biden isn’t having an easy time... with the public diplomacy involved in this week’s visit to Beijing. First, his opening remarks at a key meeting with Xi Jinping...were interrupted by a kerfuffle involving Chinese officials and journalists covering the trip.

The incidental influence that the United States exerts simply through people around the world observing its behavior is consistently underestimated, just as the influence the United States can exert intentionally by exercising its economic, military, or other instruments of hard power tends to be overestimated.

China is nonetheless active in bilateral relations with member states, and this involves both commercial diplomacy, high-level visits and public diplomacy. The last increasingly revolve around the notion of “helping friends,” whether these are nations on the periphery of Europe in need of investment or simply cash.

The animation park is clearly a priority for the central government, which included animation production in its current five-year national economic plan. Having rapidly increased its political and economic might globally, China is eager to boost its so-called soft power — its cultural appeal and influence — overseas.

An innocuous photograph of Gary Locke, the new US ambassador to China, carrying his own backpack and ordering his own coffee at an airport has charmed Chinese citizens not used to such frugality from their officials. ZhaoHui Tang, a businessman from Bellevue, Washington, took the photo on his iPhone...uploaded the photo to the Chinese social media network Sina Weibo.

Something big is happening in China, and it started soon after the onset of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and regime changes: the most serious and widespread wave of repression since the Tiananmen Square crackdowns 22 years ago. The spread of protest from one Arab-Islamic country to its neighbors might have seemed predictable. Less so was the effect in China.