Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun on Monday urged Chinese businesses in Africa to work for mutual benefits and shared development. Zhai made the call at a forum on Chinese businesses in Africa, which was hosted by China Public Diplomacy Association and attended by Chinese enterprises, academics, and African diplomats in Beijing.

Apart from the comments by U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland on the third consecutive day Wednesday, 16 January responding to Sri Lanka's removal of her chief justice, the State Department official web portal on its lead page gave an unusual highlight to Sri Lanka which it never gave before: 'US Aid to Sri Lanka'.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday morning pushed for an increase in coordination between government agencies focused on development and foreign aid, saying “If we don’t better coordinate and integrate what we’re doing, we won’t get the biggest impact.”

Public diplomacy through the distribution of aid has been a staple component of the public diplomacy strategies of various countries. This month we have seen numerous governments provide aid to the people of Haiti. Since the tragic earthquake of January 12, countless stories of aid diplomacy have appeared in the news.

Is the Arab Spring going to lead to a U.S. foreign-aid fall? Will America’s deficit and its election politics combine to reduce non-military, soft-power U.S. programs abroad?

Governor Romney delivered a major speech at the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, focusing on foreign assistance, global development, and how U.S. policy should evolve in these fields... Governor Romney sees foreign assistance as a form of "soft power." It is clear that Governor Romney sees foreign assistance as an instrument of American power and influence.

The projection of America’s abundant soft power is still wholly inadequate. Tally the scorecard in Afghanistan – you’ll see the consequence of our inadequacy in misspent treasure and tragic human sacrifice. When we fail with our soft power, we rely more heavily on hard power to achieve our goals, placing an undue, and unfair, burden on our armed forces.

This government has no feeling for 'soft power,' " Kinsman says, "because it still has little feeling for the world landscape except from the standpoint of Canadian business interests.