BEIJING – The latest “Doraemon” movie has scored the biggest box-office revenue for animated films in China, brightening the atmosphere between the two countries as they gradually mend strained ties.

“Stand By Me Doraemon,” a three-dimensional movie, was released in theaters across China last Thursday. It was the first Japanese movie shown in China after the Japanese government effectively nationalized the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea in September 2012, touching off strong reactions among both the Chinese leadership and public.

Should public servants consider cultural impact when developing policies? Julianne Schultz says cultural policy has been undervalued, but combating Australia’s cultural deficit has been stymied by equating culture with arts, and arts defined quite narrowly as the non-commercial sector. It’s time to think much more seriously about culture. For years we have bought the Clinton truism, “it’s the economy, stupid”, but this simple binary no longer provides sufficient guidance for the future.

Mahjong is nearly ubiquitous in China. The clicking of tiles is a subtle background noise that visitors might notice as they stroll the streets and parks of the country. Mahjong is not new to the world outside of China, but its rising popularity is making the game into a de-facto form of Chinese cultural diplomacy. [...] Foreign visitors took note of the game's popularity and entrepreneurs exported the game from China to the US in the 1920s.

SAN FRANCISCO—For Sam Chapple-Sokol, a chef who has spent time working at the White House, food is the missing ingredient in international relations. The Daily Signal connected with the food connoisseur in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he explained the concept of “culinary diplomacy,” a term he coined.

"I had already visited the China Pavilion more than one time in the past days but I can say that today I realized the magnificence of capital Beijing," Italian visitor of the world exposition in Italy's Milan, Mauro Magni, told Xinhua on Saturday. Magni talked to Xinhua after spectating the lion dance, Peking opera, acrobatics and dances, and Chinese ballet drama Marco Polo animating the China Pavilion and other venues at the Expo Milano 2015 site.

She was one of the international artists invited to exhibit in the Havana Biennial. And the only Jamaican!  [...] The theme of this year's Havana Biennial is 'Between the Idea and the Experience'. And the curators took the decision to move some of the art out of conventional exhibition spaces into the street. 

So there I was, on stage, swinging three hula-hoops in front of a big crowd of wildly cheering North Koreans. It's not what I went there to do and I had not anticipated that this sort of thing might happen.