Cuddly pandas are China's ambassadors of soft power and other countries use money or culture to enhance bilateral ties, but Singapore prefers to say it with flowers -- orchids, to be exact. The tropical city-state cultivates special orchid varieties and names them after a motley mix of foreign leaders and celebrities as part of its diplomatic repertoire.

@america is the State Department’s newest and most innovative American Center and is located in a popular shopping mall in downtown Jakarta. American Centers are public places where the U.S. Government engages with foreign publics through a variety of outreach activities...

Singapore, which has hosted film festivals from Israel and Germany in recent years, is opening its doors to France. “1st Rendezvous with French Cinema”...has been designed as a platform to allow French business and industry players to network with each other in the business-friendly island state.

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.

Called Viki, the Singapore-based web startup pools the linguistic talents of thousands of its users to help push world television content into markets historically impenetrable to all but a handful of foreign-language productions. The service relies on an active community of translators proficient in 158 languages to caption the footage.

Since its inception in 2007, Art Trek V has carved a place for itself in Singapore's annual arts calendar, while serving as the centerpiece of the Embassy's cultural diplomacy program.

Through the meeting of cultural heritage for these countries and with the blessing of science and technology, everyone can now open wider horizons and a promising future through working together with a spirit of friendship and humanity, he said.

...Singapore is also investing in the soft power of maritime supremacy as much as the hard power of metal boxes. The city is becoming a centre of maritime architecture and green maritime technology to complement its lead in terms of the legal and financial aspects of maritime technology.