Concert promoters, artists and curators said China was a culturally diverse country, its people citizens of the world, and their contemporary culture needed to be presented in a global context.

To make things worse, Europe’s self-proclaimed soft-power leadership—which some observers praise as complementing U.S. hard power in a supposed informal division of labor—has reached its limits. Europeans failed to foresee and contain trouble in their own backyards, East and South alike.

Throngs of Cambodian students from various Chinese schools flocked to see the fifth edition of a Chinese book fair on Monday, seeking reading books which are helpful to their studies.

In the US there is growing disquiet over China’s attempts to exert ‘soft power’ by claiming a footprint on university campuses.  In the space of a week, two US universities, Pennsylvania State and University of Chicago, have decided to shut down their Confucius Institutes amid concerns over threats to academic freedom.

Hundreds of young Muslim women from the west who travelled to Syria to marry fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, are part of what experts call, the “soft-power” of the militants. Isis has used social media to attract new recruits and build an image of the group as a reincarnation of the just and righteous state to which many Muslims aspire.

After being expelled from numerous Latin American countries for dubious activity, the United States organization USAID has developed a reputation of an organization that while providing aid is also developing ways to undermine governments in a number of the continent’s countries.

Project Mausam is Prime Minister Modi’s answer to China’s charm offensive.

Culture, in its widest interpretation, is the cumulative level of excellence achieved by a society in all the areas of creative and intellectual expression. That level of creative refinement constitutes the soft power of a country