President Ma Ying-jeou yesterday once again played up the notion of the nation’s soft power, saying its pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai had helped to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait and prevent war.

The leaders of India and China meet this week to try to boost trade and soothe tensions between two nations accounting for more than a third of humanity and crucial for driving global economic growth.

In spring 2011 three major German museum bodies – the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich – will join forces with the National Museum of China to present an exhibition on the art of the Enlightenment, to be held in Beijing.

China rallied its diplomatic allies to boycott Friday's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, lobbied other nations not to attend the event and allowed scholars to announce a rival Confucius Peace Prize. But the diplomatic drive, backed by tough rhetoric from state media and the Foreign Ministry, appeared to have damaged China's image in Western nations, analysts said.

Since the worldwide success of Zhang Yimou's "Hero" in 2002, Beijing is increasingly churning out glossy blockbusters whose production values (and budgets) rival those of Hollywood. This is all part of a China's plan to build a movie and entertainment industry, not just for its 1.3 billion inhabitants, but for the whole world—a $32 billion market.

The Nobel Peace Prize panel on Thursday defended its award to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo as based on "universal values," rejecting Beijing's accusation that it is trying force Western ideas on China.

The attempt by a group of patriotic Chinese scholars to create a Chinese alternative to the Nobel Prize appears to have backfired disastrously today, with the recipient a no-show and the Chinese government distancing itself from their efforts.

The WikiLeaks cables have revealed that the US is closely monitoring China’s activity in Africa, which causes serious concern in American diplomatic circles. The growing flow of Chinese investments is one of the particular causes of concern. The fault with the Chinese is that they invest in African countries’ economies without interfering in their internal affairs, while Western powers put forward demands of “good governance”, whatever this may mean.