Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2016
This special issue brings together historians with expertise on China and Western Europe who have the explicit intent of bridging the existing gap between two parallel strands of scholarship, that is, Europe in the Cold War and the history of Socialist China, and combining the different perspectives and approaches of international, diplomatic, business, and cultural historiographies. The contributors’ lively interaction and close collaboration has been the key to the conceptual development of a broader view of the relations between West European countries and Socialist China in the early decades of the Cold War, as well as of China's policy towards the capitalist world before the Reform and Opening era.
We would like to thank both the University of Padua and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice for funding the group's research We are grateful to the colleagues who discussed our work-in-progress papers on the occasion of two international academic conferences organized in Padua and Venice in 2013 and 2014 respectively: Lorenzo Capisani, Nicola Casarini, Laurent Cesari, Li Danhui, Shen Zhihua, Elisa Giunipero Stephanie Palladini, and Mario Filippo Pini. Finally, we also thank the editors of Modern Asian Studies and the anonymous reviewers for their useful remarks and comments.
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