This volume examines relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and socialist Eastern European states during the Cold War. The chapters take previous findings on government policy and China’s role as a global player in the Cold War game as a starting point to locate the PRC in the socialist world and assess levels of interaction beyond diplomatic and governmental relations. By focusing on transfers and interconnections and the social dimension of governmental interactions, the primary goal of this book is to explore structures, institutions, and spaces of interaction between China and Eastern Europe and their potential autonomy from political conjunctures.

The guiding question that the book raises is: To what extent did Chinese and Eastern European players, outside the range of the power centres, have room to manoeuvre beyond the agendas of the Kremlin, national governments, or party leaderships? The question of the relative autonomy becomes especially vibrant against the backdrop of the development of Sino–Soviet relations from alliance to split to reconciliation through the Cold War era.

This book contributes to the growing scholarship on East-South and intra-bloc relations from the perspective of global and transnational history and will be of interest to researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of History, East European and Russian studies, International Relations and politics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Cold War History.