The man expected to be China's next president, current Vice President Xi Jinping, is meeting Tuesday with President Obama at the White House. Richard Wike, Associate Director of the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, answers questions about public opinion at home and abroad regarding China and the United States.

The administration is proposing to trim assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia in order to bolster spending in areas given higher priority by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Middle East would gain, with the creation of a special $770 million fund to support political and economic reform in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

China is ready to work with the United States to advance people-to-people exchanges, Education Minister Yuan Guiren said prior to Vice-President Xi Jinping's visit to the US. People-to-people exchange is still an important driving force in today's increasingly close China-US relations.

Humor represents a more oblique manner of communicating ideas, and therefore can be a powerful medium to conduct public diplomacy. The beauty of using humor as a means to transmit ideas is that the jovial nature of comedy can indirectly communicate weightier subjects in a lighthearted manner that can diffuse weighty realities.

“If you are going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise, they’ll kill you.”
-George Bernard Shaw

I used to think that humor was one thing that didn’t translate in cross-cultural communication. In my travels, I had watched numerous attempts at jokes fail miserably as they got lost in translation or cultural nuances. Things often ended awkwardly amid the seemingly untranslatable nature of humor.

Thought leaders from the worlds of technology and government are seeking next-generation answers to a range of challenges, including how U.S. international broadcasting can add renewed luster to its global brands. Meeting at the Washington bureau, experts discussed how digital innovations might help create new audiences in specific markets.

For FY 2013 the BBG has requested more than $720 million for U.S. international broadcasting, a decrease of 4.2 percent from FY 2012. This request supports U.S. foreign policy priorities. The proposals in it include retooling to reach strategically important audiences from Cuba to China and build out the agency’s digital infrastructure.

The Obama administration on Monday proposed $2.4 billion in financial aid to Pakistan for the fiscal year 2013. Of this, $2.2 billion is in assistance to strengthen democratic and civil institutions that provide a bulwark against extremism and support joint security and counter-terrorism efforts.