As the southern city of Guangzhou hosts the Asian Games, which will come to a close on Nov. 27 in China, the prosperous city is putting its best face forward and has welcomed foreigners from all across Asia. However, the sweet welcome the visitors are receiving puts the treatment of a growing presence of African immigrants in the city into stark relief.

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and its escorts are heading for the waters off the Korean peninsula, in the aftermath of the flare-up between North and South Korea. This is very much gunboat diplomacy 21st Century-style.

But some had grander hopes for the Expo – namely, that it would ‘showcase China’s soft power’... As it happened, the events that swirled around the Expo’s closing weeks showcased something quite else: Why China doesn’t have much soft power and why the West, broadly defined, still has it in spades.

Just after artillery fire at the divided Korean Peninsula border struck a hard blow to international relations, filmmakers from Beijing presented a gift celebrating soft power to North Korean leader and cinephile Kim Jong-Il.

The ongoing "Chinese Language Year in Russia" program has deepened mutual understanding and friendship between the two peoples, and injected fresh momentum into the all-round bilateral cooperation, said Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov.

Two months ago, during Asian Art Week, Christie’s auction house invited hundreds of wealthy collectors, scholars and art patrons to its New York headquarters in Rockefeller Center for what it described as a special exhibition and symposium about the rise of Chinese contemporary art.

Six countries declined invitations to the December 10 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo after an unprecedented campaign by China to sabotage attendance, the Norwegian Nobel Committee told Reuters.

The Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange released today, reports a decrease in the number of American students studying abroad...For the first time in the 25 years that the data has been tracked, the total number of U.S. students studying abroad for academic credit did not increase.