The contrast between LA and another great city, Seoul, is remarkable. I have been going to Seoul for about 20 years now, and I just brought a group of USC students there for a comparative international development class. Back in 1992, when I first visited Seoul, it was an emerging city of considerable promise, but also with considerable poverty. It has since become one of the world’s rich cities.

Petraeus’ appointment includes affiliations with the USC School of Social Work, including the program in military social work; the USC Price School of Public Policy; the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, including the program in public diplomacy

A mixture of native Chinese and Americans, we hope to accomplish an ambitious set of goals: to gain an understanding of how public diplomacy is thought about and engaged in academic contexts as well as how it is innovatively used in practice—through film, at airports, over the Internet, in media, and by corporations.

This is the America that draws ever-growing numbers of Chinese students, who then take home a view of the United States that refutes the stereotypes.Such an exercise of informal diplomacy on a grand scale cannot help but change U.S.-China relations. It may even change the world.

The Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars at USC has their annual conference tomorrow, April 6, 2012. The conference will provide a discussion on new technologies and emerging actors in the amorphous “thing” sometimes called public diplomacy.

The 2012 American Film Showcase...is an international cultural diplomacy initiative that will bring award-winning American films, including documentaries, feature films and animated shorts, to foreign audiences through events worldwide.