“What we have seen in our exotic travels so far is that the Peace Corps is about the best use of soft power the US has ever made,” says Orth. The entire budget of the Peace Corps costs 5 hours in Iraq. Plus these Americans speak the language and are accepted and loved.”

The Chinese communist regime’s United Front soft-power propaganda war aimed at shaping world opinion through culture, film, and media, has just fired an embarrassing dud, with not a single audience member showing up at the 2011 China Movie Culture Week opening night at New York’s Lincoln Center.

At the end of its four-day annual policy meeting, China’s ruling Communist Party approved a programme to make its ideology more popular at home and boost China’s soft power abroad.

India is one the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India recognizes 18 official regional languages in India with a developed script and literary tradition. In addition, there are nearly ‘1576 rationalized mother tongues’ or dialects as per the 1991 census of the Government of India. Linguistic diversity adds to the richness of Indian culture and every region of India has a highly developed literary tradition with excellent writers of national, and a few of international fame.

APDS Blogger: Rajesh Mirchandani

For anyone who is Indian-born, as I am, the chance to see Ravi Shankar perform is akin to an audience with the Pope for Catholics – and perhaps even harder to accomplish. This one-off show at the Disney Hall had been scheduled for October last year and postponed twice - due, the press release said, to “illness and visa complications” (a public diplomacy blunder for U.S. immigration?).

The Commonwealth, too, has an opportunity by virtue of its strengths to carve out a new role for itself in the world...It is not an alliance or a trading area.... But it is a soft power network that represents the realities of our changing world and is underused. We intend to seize this opportunity in Perth.

Due to failures of civilian institutions, many soldiers have become de facto nation-builders, anthropologists, and public diplomats. They were not, in many cases, trained for these missions. But they were the only option—albeit an expensive and inefficient one.

Australia should grasp the chance to play a critical role in fostering so-called soft power connections between India and China, thereby boosting its international standing as well as regional harmony. That is the rationale behind the new Soft Power Advocacy and Research Centre at Macquarie University, launched last week.