There is now a huge demand in the international community for China's views on global issues, said Wang, adding that online discussions between senior Chinese diplomats and the general public are an example of the country's drive for policy transparency.

Josh Rogin and others reported last month on the Secretary Clinton’s new Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Organized as a Federal Advisory Committee, it is reasonable to expect that all of the meetings will be closed door, which is unfortunate.

The early 2000s did feel like the European moment... In this magazine in 2004, Parag Khanna described the "stylish" European Union as a "metrosexual superpower" strutting past the testosterone-fueled, boorish United States on the catwalk of global diplomacy.

Learning another language will open the door to another culture and enhance your career opportunities in the increasingly global economy...The new language deepens your capacity to communicate and to understand the challenges of all cross-cultural relations.

On the first day of 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao published an essay on culture in a...The language, lifted from Hu's speech at a party plenum on "promoting culture" in October last year, has been interpreted as largely hostile toward the "west" and its machinations to divide China.

Today the entire public diplomacy budget is reportedly of the order of magnitude of what a medium-to-large Israeli corporation spends on promoting fast-food or snacks. If one does not invest in winning hearts and minds, it is no wonder that they are not won.

Mass media, in its different forms, has been used by the State to manufacture consent or create dissent in other countries. The former involves media management, the latter is more in the nature of psychological warfare used in peace time, indeed at all times, as an exercise of soft power.

These days, Soviet-style samizdat is doing the rounds at the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. It is a press release on the letter to Croatian government by Snjezana Pelivan, a Croatian journalist living in Prague.