The networks that primarily seek to establish, protect and expand US primacy in Asia are driven by corporate and financial special interests including banks, the energy industry, defence contractors, agricultural and pharmaceutical giants, the US entertainment industry and media as well as tech giants.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has embarked on a quest to make China’s voice heard internationally. “President Xi Jinping has vowed to promote China’s cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values and showing the charm of Chinese culture to the world,” China’s Xinhua News Agency wrote in 2014. “The stories of China should be well told, voices of China well spread, and characteristics of China well explained,” the president said. 

This is our target, to keep youth healthy, mind-wise, motivated, productive. You have to invest in the right culture. Leaving such spaces, now it's very dangerous, not for Arabs, but for the international community that many terrorist groups and fundamentalists and radical ideas can infiltrate the new media and new technology to the minds of children and youths and youngsters. They can implant their seeds for irregular thinking and bad doing.

While U.S. officials are consulting intensely with their South Korean counterparts, not enough attention is being paid to Beijing’s perspective, even though China would figure heavily into any prospective U.S. action toward the North. By examining Beijing’s role in each of the three main North Korea policy strategies under debate in the United States, the “China factor” emerges as a decisive one, in ways that policymakers need to weigh carefully.

Beijing sees sporting prowess as a key soft power weapon and sensitivities over China’s performance at Rio 2016 led Chinese television censors to briefly stymie the BBC World broadcast about the plight of China’s gymnasts. The screen went black, as routinely occurs during stories considered politically inconvenient to the Communist Party. 

From a ‘cultural ambassador’, the Vietnamese tourism sector is making efforts to make the Ao Dai into a ‘tourism ambassador’. The image of Ao Dai has been used to promote the beauty of Vietnamese culture. In addition, the long dress has become a tourism product.