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.

In politics, words matter. [...] But with a growing number of national governments using Twitter to communicate, a head of state can signal a major policy shift in a mere 140 characters. President-elect Donald Trump's use of Twitter has been a case study in how a short message by an influential figure can potentially change the global landscape.

Connecting China and Western Europe, Poland has been tapped as a key link in the Chinese government's "Belt and Road" initiative. Chinese President Xi Jinping made a stop in Poland back in June, overseeing the signing of around 40 different trade and partnership agreements.

In the past decade, trade exchange between China and Latin America grew 20-fold to reach 236.5 billion US dollars in 2015, according to the Chinese government, which has free-trade agreements with several regional countries, such as Chile, Peru and Costa Rica. 

In 2016, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India continued to enlarge its foreign policy options and generally pursue the goal of raising the country's international profile. Over the year India exhibited more self-confidence in dealing with challenges, showed more assertiveness in defending its interests, and displayed far more flexibility in exploring compromises on issues of global concern.