Documents from Mossack Fonseca, [...] reveal offshore companies linked to Deng Jiagui, who is married to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s older sister, as well as Li Xiaolin, the daughter of Li Peng, the former premier. […] that’s not stopping officials around the world from addressing the issue of perception. One way to do that is ordering a media blackout [...]

It is bringing together some 50 diplomats and scholars from 25 countries to look at how states are using digital platforms as a diplomatic tool. The conference is dealing with a number of issues that are arising as a result of the use of social media by foreign ministries around the world, including the need to train diplomats in social media engagement, ways to evaluate the impact, and the intersect between digital diplomacy, public diplomacy, and nation branding.

According to Matthew Barzun, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, diplomats in the digital age have a lot to learn from the story of Encarta, Microsoft’s ill-fated digital encyclopedia. […] Instead, he suggested, managing relationships between countries in the 21st century will be most successful when it focuses on “analog diplomacy in a networked world”—what Mr. Barzun jokingly called “Wikiplomacy.”