The Denver Post
U.S. Olympic Committee officials this year instituted mandatory "ambassador" seminars that teach about China and encourage athletes to think carefully about how best to represent their country.

This article originally appeared on the USC US-China Institute's web magazine US-China Today.

Dear User: Due to the large number of text messages you’ve sent to the opposite sex, creating the worst and their negative influence on society, we have already suspended your text message service. Tomorrow, please bring your wooden stool to the police station to execute moral re-education!
(Translated Chinese Text Message)

This article first appeared on the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight blog.

I spent the past week at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose, California.

There were a number of interesting panels, but two themes caught my attention that I’d like to discuss here: 1) Concern for ROI or Return on Investment in Virtual Worlds; and 2) The Rise of China.

ROI

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on September, 20, 2007

Lesson 1: When in China, buy a bike.

In my previous contribution to this site I offered a brief and wide-ranging survey of contemporary Chinese public diplomacy which I described as "work in progress." China's relations with such odious regimes as Zimbabwe, together with its continued intimidation of democratic Taiwan, mean that positive developments, such as its increasingly affable and sensitive attitude towards Japan and its role in defusing nuclear crises in the Korean peninsula, are obscured.