he so-called six-party talks — the on-again-off-again international mechanism by which the US, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear aspirations — are often cited as an example of multilateral diplomacy.

To increase China's highbrow soft power, the Chinese government could initiate more scholarly exchange programs with other countries, set up more Confucius Institutes abroad, and increase government-sponsored and government-involved people-to-people exchange programs.

The overall measure of Australians' "warmth" towards China is captured in the Lowy Institute's "thermometer," a gauge measuring how positively people feel towards a range of countries. Last year China was ranked eighth with a warmth of 59 degrees out of a possible 100, just under Malaysia and just above India.

India’s answer to those in America who are egging on the Obama administration to get into a trade war with this country is going to be typically Oriental: New Delhi is to soon embark on a major mission to spread the country’s soft power in the US and capitalise on it.

As we prepared recently for this week’s Scottish launch of a British Council-commissioned report by Demos into the role that culture plays in the race for soft power in the 21st century, I thought back on that episode at the LHC; how culture, like the sciences, really does bring people together – even those with very different world views.

As a current citizen of Berlin, I was aware of the large-scale relief effort the U.S. mounted after the Soviet Union had blocked all land supply routes into West Berlin in June 1948, in what became known to the world as the Berlin Airlift. In this context, I had also heard the story of American pilots dropping candy from their C-54s when flying into Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin. I could not, however, have spoken with certainty about the origin or the scope of the candy dropping operation, even though by now whole books have been written on the subject.

Soft power is the kind of power relation that existed when India had benevolent kings compassionate towards their subject, and the subjects in turn were close to the rulers. Soft power is all about spirituality, which is away from religion, and if you are simply honest, you are spiritual.

The world is surrounded, and even blinded by the soft power of Western countries, the Western media and the information they provide. Many Chinese have already been accustomed to understanding the world based on Western ways of thinking. When meeting with two Chinese PhD candidates in Harvard University, Wang was shocked that these two highly-educated Chinese students described their motherland, where they had lived in for years, in terms shaped by Western discourse.