The English Premier League recently signed its biggest deal outside of the UK. Chinese electronics giant Suning has stumped up £560m for the television rights to broadcast its games to the growing legion of fans there. But it’s not just the size of the agreement that’s eye-catching. It’s a double display of soft power at work: by both China and the UK.

Over the past few decades of China’s rise, Beijing’s soft power pitch to the developing east has been an indictment of Ugly Americanism. China had fallen victim to Western and Japanese imperialism, and as a result pledged to act not as a patron but a partner in decolonialism and development. 

Japanese authorities now want to tap this soft power for tourism, amid an ambitious drive by the Abe administration to double burgeoning foreign tourist arrivals to 40 million by 2020. [...] The association, working with industry members and local governments, wants to create a whole suite of services and products, from shuttle buses to merchandising, to boost the experience for visitors - and bring in the yen.
 

Soon after coming to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi prudently decided to emphasise India’s rich tradition of Buddhism in a soft-power approach to Asian geopolitics. Apart from countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Mongolia and others, he even struck a direct chord with China to revive India-China ties. 

For over a decade, South Korean businessmen and officials have regularly met with representatives of the Maghreb and most developed countries in Central Africa. [...] Furthermore, the author stressed the role of "soft power" in Seoul’s presence in Africa.  "South Korea is a recognized international power. It wants to have an international policy adequate to this status," Dayez-Burgeon noted.

Indians — especially the youth — are learning Korean, eating kimchi and travelling to Seoul to sample the life shown on their favourite TV dramas, and films [...] Over the last decade, K-pop and K-dramas, as well as their movies, have unleashed a tsunami of growth and popularity in India, and the numbers of avid fans continue to grow exponentially.

With China not budging from its position on India's NSG bid, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has called for a "sensible and pragmatic" conversation between the two sides on how "not accommodating" each others aspiration was detrimental to the overall relationship. The Foreign Secretary also observed India should use its soft power and do more in improving its image in China as people there do not have a very fair idea about the country.