Presidents can influence sports. Dwight Eisenhower attempted to improve relations with the Soviet Union in the late 1950s with a sports and cultural exchange program. Richard Nixon opened trade with China after a ping pong tournament between the US and China and Nixon’s effort was named “ping pong diplomacy” in the early 1970s.

China Central Television (CCTV), Beijing’s largest TV network, said it would launch a new global media platform on New Year’s Day to help re-brand China overseas. [...] President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory letter, urged the new network to “tell China stories well, spread China’s voice well, let the world know a three-dimensional, colorful China, and showcase China’s role as a builder of world peace”.

China's policy towards Africa has the potential to lift the continent out of poverty if all its contents are implemented accordingly. In the last nine years, the Asian economic giant released two position papers on its policy on Africa, which act as guidelines to its dealings with the continent.

China, which regards itself as one of the world’s oldest civilizations, but one that has been repressed by outsiders, has often made culture a battlefield. It has tussled with its neighbors and rewritten history textbooks. In other instances, soft power skirmishes may be seen as substitutes for hot war. So China’s recent embrace of Japanese movies may be more complicated than audiences falling for the cuteness purveyed by Japan’s cartoon factories.

Confucius Institutes in Egypt are seeing a huge surge in popularity. According to the manager at the Institute at Cairo University, they are gradually moving away from targeting students of the Chinese language, and are beginning to attract interest from different faculties, and educational establishments in other cities across Egypt.