In Beijing, the country’s leadership was recognizing the importance of soft power. Meanwhile in Hollywood, DreamWorks was given the green light to a movie called Kung Fu Panda. I would love to tell you that we did this as part of a very shrewd strategy to gain entrée into China. It wasn’t. We just liked the idea of a film about a panda who wants to do kung fu.

Western critics tend to focus on the media and cultural components of this push while ignoring the rest. At a time when anxious prognostications about China’s rise dominate media headlines, deriding China’s soft-power strategy -- in particular, its failure to grasp the global appeal of the free press and the free market -- has become a popular act of reassurance for Western academics and media analysts.

The writer also had a 45-minute meeting with Mr Morsi. The Syrian crisis and the relationship with the neighbours were among the topics. But the Ethiopian dam crisis was the focal point, with Mr Morsi saying he preferred the "soft power" way to handle it.

In opting out of the global platform, the Lalit Kala Akademi and the ministry of culture have robbed the country of an opportunity to roll out its famed soft power. For millions across the world, the 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation is represented by one iconic image — a dancer cast in bronze. A similar image of contemporary India will be difficult to fi

It is arguable that foreign aid and to a larger extent development policy, which includes not only Official Development Assistance but also people-to-people links, migration policy, trade policy and peacekeeping is a core part of our regional identity and a core component of our “soft power” in the Asian Century.

The Chinese Communist Party does not hide its hostility to and fear of the political values -- freedom, human rights, political competition, and constitutional rule -- that underpin American democracy. In the eyes of the Chinese ruling elites, the United States presents a political threat, even though they understand that a full-fledged military conflict between two nuclear-armed great powers is extremely unlikely. Chinese leaders feel so endangered by U.S. soft power that they are now even orchestrating a propaganda campaign against constitutionalism.

Russia will increase spending on foreign cultural and educational projects as part of the Kremlin-backed 'Soft Power' concept aimed at improving the country's image abroad, a news report said Wednesday.

The mirror image of this issue is that traditionally, there has been too little emphasis from Beijing upon public diplomacy programmes to reach out to foreign publics directly. Rather than winning hearts and minds in this way, Beijing has tended to place emphasis, especially in Africa and the Middle East, on improving working relationships with strategically important governments through assistance programmes that may not always serve the interest of local people.