The Balance Of Soft Power
As in the United States, soft power has been treated as a hopeful idea in China: an important additive to the country’s rise, especially its economic expansion. Read More Here
Tag: language
The Strands Of Arabia: how A People And Religion Were Built On Language
“There were probably Arabs before there was Arabia,” writes Tim Mackintosh-Smith in his extraordinary new survey of these peoples. After all, what does the word “Arab” even mean? For Arabs themselves the term remains elusive: the Egyptian writer and public intellectual Taha Hussein argued that the people to whom the label applied were “in utter […]
Why Young Pakistanis Are Learning Chinese
In the past, English was the sole language of upward mobility in Pakistan, both a relic of British colonial rule and a means of accessing Western markets, educational institutions, and jobs. Now, Mandarin has become the “hot new trend,” said Abbas, the Mandarin instructor in Gilgit…In Pakistan, the growth in Mandarin-language learning has been fuelled […]
Chinese Culture As The New Soft Power Currency
Despite the many issues of human rights abuses, censorship and suppression of dissent, China has managed a great victory by diverting the world’s attention to itself as a strong economic, political and cultural power. Read Here – Swarajya
Australia’s Big Bet On Asia
It was the talk of teaching Hindi to schoolchildren down under that grabbed all the headlines in India, but Canberra’s White Paper Australia in the Asian Century merits wider attention because governments today rarely state far-reaching plans of any kind, let alone those involving an epochal reorientation of political sensibility. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who commissioned the […]
looking beyond borders 