It is China’s heightened interest in South African media, however, which has raised questions about the country’s intentions and objectives which could be viewed as the seeking of “soft power”, or how it can leverage its perception and influence on the continent.

Last week, for the first time ever, there was a panel dedicated to discussion of public diplomacy at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Held in Washington, DC the conference, and this panel in particular, offered an opportunity for scholars to talk about the emergence of public diplomacy as a subject of study in the discipline.

I recently returned from the annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Chicago where suddenly everyone’s talking about public diplomacy. Or at least, using the term. It calls to mind a favorite movie quote: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”.

We should employ the term purposefully, conscious of its connotations and respecting the real-world limits of its application -- not by staking out our own isolated outposts for the term’s usage, but rather by building bridges between our understanding of the communicative dynamics at play and already-existing insights into the subject of public diplomacy.