Receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award this year are Chinese-Japanese artist couple RongRong & inri, who are based between Beijing and Kyoto, straddling two dynamic contemporary photography scenes.

The fun and joy that Xinhua is searching for reflects a quandary facing China’s leadership: As Xi navigates a difficult phase of his administration, his messaging machine — for decades one of the Communist Party’s most crucial levers of power — has been struggling to make itself heard.

Other sports have created global appeal before. The NFL, for one, has been playing regular-season games before sold-out crowds in London since 2007. [...] But Ranadive envisions basketball as the world sport of the 21st century, calling his globalization plan “NBA 3.0."

Two Chinese giant pandas have arrived in South Korea from their previous home in Sichuan Province, China. [...] China has been sending their pandas abroad as a sign of goodwill since the 1950s as part of what’s known as ‘panda diplomacy’. 

While domestically it defines the debate between Apple and the FBI, we should not minimize its relevance, and consequently the outcome of the court battle, on American soft power. Sinologist David Shambaugh does a side-by-side comparison between the United States and China in his book China Goes Global: The Partial Power. 

Keen to strengthen relations with Africa, China will over the next three years train at least 200,000 African professionals in skills-based fields. Ambassador Lin Songtian [...] revealed on Tuesday that the offer was part of the Asian power's commitment to build the continent's capacity to achieve its development vision. 

Leading Chinese performing artists who included opera singers, acrobats, dancers and instrumentalists on Sunday entertained a mammoth crowd in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. [...] In his opening remarks, Liu said the music concert was part of a series of activities that have been lined up to promote Sino-Kenya cultural cooperation.