soft power

The Chinese Communist Party has detailed its ambitious but secretive strategy for transforming the internet into a force for keeping it in power and projecting ''soft power'' abroad.

Some 1.6 million people visited Israel between January and July, according to figures released by the Tourism Ministry on Monday – an increase of 39 percent over the same period in 2009, and 10% more than in 2008, the country’s previous record year.

For years, Bollywood’s producers and directors have favored the pristine backdrop of Switzerland for their films... In the process, they have created an enormous curiosity about things Swiss in generations of middle-class Indians, who are now earning enough to travel here in search of their dreams.

A new federal program to support the Russian language abroad will appear in 2011, the head of the Agency for the CIS Affairs and Compatriots Living Abroad Farit Mukhametshin told Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow.

The teacup diplomacy pioneered by Nancy Reagan and her Soviet counterpart, Raisa Gorbachev, in the mid ’80s, and formally reinstated as the “spouse’s program” in 2004 by Laura Bush, is archaic at a time political spouses are as professionally accomplished as their mates—and increasingly male.

Yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, cosponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, I spoke on a panel focused on "Smart Power" with a heavy emphasis on the Afghanistan War.

A superpower is generally understood to be a nation, empire, or civilization that can project power globally; that is, a nation that possesses economic, political and cultural or "soft" power along with overwhelming military or "hard" power. It's certainly not hard to appreciate China's emerging economic power.

They call her India’s Miss Manners, and she is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar industry to make Indian companies more competitive globally by improving their workers’ social skills. Pria Warrick has become the guru of graces for a new generation of call-center techies, chief executives, animation artists, MBAs and Bollywood film stars, all of whom are helping drive India’s rise as a world economic power but sometimes without a certain polish.

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