Vogue editor Anna Wintour announced a new initiative called the China Design Program. It will be a kind of cultural exchange that sends American designers to China to learn about manufacturing, marketing, and other aspects of the fashion business there—and a Chinese designer spends time in the U.S.

The award’s sponsors are professors and academics who say they are independent of the government. While the government has enthusiastically embraced the need for more robust cultural links to enhance China’s “soft power,” it wants that charm campaign to stay under the firm direction of the ruling Communist Party.

A star-studded...cultural forum that brings the likes of organic-food advocate Alice Waters, filmmaker Joel Coen and cellist Yo Yo Ma to Beijing this week...is a response to the sclerotic environment surrounding China policy in Washington D.C...a “class trip” that would create “some fund of common experience [between the two sides] where you’re not always arguing.”

Once you're networked via social media...you're open to profound changes in "who you are and what your personal space is". The idea of any seemingly arbitrary authority standing in the way of all that can easily become an affront – and at the same time, your means of communication offers you a method of opposition and resistance: online, in the real world, or both.

Cultural activists, cultural workers, researchers and policymakers from Mali and Algeria to Singapore, and Limpopo to Cape Town, gathered in Joburg recently for the much-anticipated Diversity Conference.

New perspectives enhanced the education of Air War College students as 15 State Department diplomats participated in seminars during the National Security Decision Making...Their visit was an opportunity... to learn from each other about public diplomacy and global issues.

Leaders such as Pires and Chissano, however, tended to understand Americans better than Americans understood them. They sought and won help from non-official America that demonstrated by their actions that America...was indeed a small “d” democracy in which millions free persons could make their own political choices to support justice in Africa.

The technological and informational revolutions that have spurred (and continue to spur) globalization and interconnectedness between cultures make it impossible for tyrants to rule for the entirety of their lifetimes while mercilessly subjugating their peoples to lives of servitude with no prospect of ever tasting the true meaning of freedom.