As crowds gathered on Nov. 4, 1972, to catch a glimpse of two adorably rare creatures making their debut at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, an orangutan named Miyo unfurled a welcome banner. A curtain was then pulled aside to reveal two anxious giant pandas — Kang Kang and Lan Lan — and Japan fell head over heels in love, both with the bears and what they represented: Sino-Japanese friendship.

The first overseas Confucius Institute (CI) was set up in South Korea in 2004. It is a non-profit educational organisation dedicated to the promotion of the Chinese language (Mandarin) and culture. And because their modus operandi is to operate within learning institutions, there are continued criticisms from encroaching on academic freedom to even espionage.

There’s something strange about the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s recent visit to Cuba: It’s largely revolved around whether the Castro government deserved restored relations with the United States and a visit from the U.S. president. [...] If diplomacy is three-dimensional, the political debate in America over U.S.-Cuban affairs has been occurring on only one plane.

What is public diplomacy, quite often mentioned in the news? And how has it — and its variants/related terms — changed the nature of traditional diplomacy, if at all? Dictionaries define traditional diplomacy as “ the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country’s representatives abroad“ or “the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations.”

Jack Masey, a designer for the United States Information Agency whose model American kitchen, part of an exhibition in Moscow in 1959, provided the stage for an argument about communism and capitalism between Nikita S. Khrushchev and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, one of the Cold War’s most memorable confrontations, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 91.

In a vast parking lot outside Cambodia’s famed Angkor Wat temples complex stands a new museum built by North Korea, part of a lucrative charm offensive by a hermit state exporting its monumental art to a handful of foreign allies.

In 2009, the author and food historian Andrew Coe published the book Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. From the first Americans to travel to China in 1784 through widespread anti-Chinese sentiment in the 19th century, Coe traced how it took the United States quite some time to develop a taste for Chinese cuisine.