As the numbers have grown, so too has the concern of Western academics who believe the project presents a serious threat to freedom of thought and speech in education.

Representatives from the Chinese and Thai governments signed bilateral agreements worth more than 62 billion yuan. The trade and development accords are yet another instance of Beijing engaging in a soft power approach to diplomacy with its Southeast Asian neighbors.

Three fundamental and one extraneous force are currently colliding in our region. Each of these forces has its own agenda and because none of them is truly dominant, the end result is a clash rather than competition.

So much World Service discussion habitually worries about cuts to inherited structures, but here was a bracing counter-blast: never mind soft power; now let’s make all the hard choices that help us, not Whitehall.

The Ethiopian Public diplomacy team has achieved its objectives. The Egyptian President Al-Sisi said, Ethiopia has every right to development and utilization of the Nile Waters.

The Cuba announcement is the latest example of “soft power,’’ much ridiculed in an age of terrorism, religious extremism and regional warfare. It’s a policy that taps nonmilitary advantages such as technology, financial power and open institutions to push American ideals. 

The idea of Russian “soft power” became fashionable, but it was very different to European “soft power”. So-called Russian soft power was just “softer power”, including any means of coercion not involving tanks. It was, in the English phrase, “softly-softly” power, or “covert power”, the type of behind-the-scenes influence encapsulated in the Russian phrase kuluarna polityka – politics in corridors, not just away from public influence, but without formal record.