According to Chinese vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, the media has a crucial role to play in ensuring that people all over the world understand what Belt and Road initiative is all about. [...] The NPC official, just like the vice premier, however admitted that a lot needs to be done to get more people to understand what the concept stands for. In his opinion, the “project of the century” as is being referred to, seeks to only build a community of shared future and prosperity for all.

Just a couple of weeks before the Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing earlier this month, Sinica Podcast co-host Jeremy Goldkorn and I spoke with Joseph Nye, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, for our show. We talked about soft power, a term he coined and defined, and for which he’s perhaps best known — about China’s fixation with it, its prospects for augmenting it in the age of Trump, and the decidedly mixed results of its multibillion-dollar investments in soft power projects.