The film, “The Flowers of War...is Mr. Zhang’s take on the Nanjing Massacre. At the moment, no other cultural product or artist better embodies the hunger by the Chinese state and its citizens to create culture that can attract foreigners, bolstering China’s “soft power”...

A Chinese scholar recently said that China is catching up to the U.S. and is becoming a superpower. But according to a media survey, most Chinese don’t think so...The Chinese public’s pessimism about China’s rise as a superpower is shared by Chinese intellectuals...

The early 2000s did feel like the European moment... In this magazine in 2004, Parag Khanna described the "stylish" European Union as a "metrosexual superpower" strutting past the testosterone-fueled, boorish United States on the catwalk of global diplomacy.

On the first day of 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao published an essay on culture in a...The language, lifted from Hu's speech at a party plenum on "promoting culture" in October last year, has been interpreted as largely hostile toward the "west" and its machinations to divide China.

Greek TV channels realised that buying the glitzy tales of forbidden love... from long-standing regional rival Turkey, was cheaper than filming their own..."Greeks feel closer to Turks than they did," he told Reuters. "Sometimes soft power is more important than political power."

Today the entire public diplomacy budget is reportedly of the order of magnitude of what a medium-to-large Israeli corporation spends on promoting fast-food or snacks. If one does not invest in winning hearts and minds, it is no wonder that they are not won.

Mass media, in its different forms, has been used by the State to manufacture consent or create dissent in other countries. The former involves media management, the latter is more in the nature of psychological warfare used in peace time, indeed at all times, as an exercise of soft power.

Israel is tired of playing it straight: It is recruiting gays and lesbians as unofficial envoys. In a bid to boost its international image, the country’s ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs has established a cadre of diverse volunteers who speak about Israel around the world.