China Central Television (CCTV), Beijing’s largest TV network, said it would launch a new global media platform on New Year’s Day to help re-brand China overseas. [...] President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory letter, urged the new network to “tell China stories well, spread China’s voice well, let the world know a three-dimensional, colorful China, and showcase China’s role as a builder of world peace”.

Past presidents have tried to use "soft power" strategies to bolster the United States' cultural appeal abroad and lend moral weight to the country's standing as the free world's leading alternative to communist or authoritarian systems. Such tactics are not a substitute for military and economic "hard power," foreign affairs analysts said, but can help shape global perceptions of the United States and its motives.

China, which regards itself as one of the world’s oldest civilizations, but one that has been repressed by outsiders, has often made culture a battlefield. It has tussled with its neighbors and rewritten history textbooks. In other instances, soft power skirmishes may be seen as substitutes for hot war. So China’s recent embrace of Japanese movies may be more complicated than audiences falling for the cuteness purveyed by Japan’s cartoon factories.