Diplomatic Pouch: With Mike Peters

Croatia's former president Stjepan Mesic signed copies of his new book, China and the Balkans, at events around Zagreb this month. The first chapter describes how China is taking the road to peaceful development, Xinhua News Agency reports.

'I want to send my very best wishes to everyone celebrating Chinese New Year - in Britain, in China and all around the world," UK Prime Minister David Cameron says in a holiday video widely viewed on Youku.com. "Britain's links with China are becoming ever stronger, and ever deeper. Britain today accounts for about one-tenth of all foreign investment in China," he says, adding that the UK will be a voice against protectionism in the EU "now and in the years ahead".

Katerina Stai-Failadis works as a professor of Greek literature in Beijing, but her students may have seen her online this month in a different role: champion of olive oil. Stai-Failadis, the wife of the Greek embassy's press counselor, teamed up with BTV cooking-show hostess Han Ping to produce a Mediterranean feast with an underlying message of health: Olive oil is good for you. The result was a mouth-watering multimedia presentation, inspiring lip-smacking from television viewers, online followers of the embassy website and readers of the 60-plus page magazine produced by the embassy. Stai-Failadis says she uses olive oil in Chinese cooking as well.

The 4th Sino-German Environmental Forum convened in Berlin late last month, organized by the German environment ministry and the Asia-Pacific Committee of German Business. Environment Minister Katherina Reiche and China's Vice Minister of Environmental Protection Zhou Qian, hosted representatives from politics, business and science to discuss resource efficiency, recycling and water management.

The Italian embassy announced to its expatriate community in China that it plans to establish an association of young Italians in China (AGIC). Open to anyone who wants to join, the association will be officially constituted Saturday, March 9 at the auditorium of the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing. More information is available on the association's website, www.assogic.com.

Danish Ambassador to China and Mongolia Friis Arne Petersen visited Ulan Bator to meet with government ministers, visit economic growth areas, and meet representatives from the Mongolian civil society. Petersen met Foreign Minister Luvsanvandan Bold, Minister for Construction and Urban Development Ts. Bayarsaikhan and other officials.

'We have been working on quite a few fronts with our Greek colleagues to bring more Chinese tourists here," Chinese Ambassador Du Qiwen told journalists in Athens last week. "The latest project is the production of a four-episode, 120 minutes, TV documentary series called Glamorous Greece. A six-member crew from China Central Television was filming in Greece for five weeks," he said. "The program is going to be broadcast on the CCTV documentary channel, which has a home viewership of 800 million and has an extensive cooperation network with the world TV media. In the future, if all of a sudden you find big crowds of Chinese tourists clicking cameras in front of historical monuments, and you get tired of them, you should know who is partly to blame."

Send embassy news to michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 02/08/2013 page31)