Sino-European Relations during the Cold War and the Rise of a Multipolar World combines critical oral history with newly translated documentary sources to provide insights into the dynamics of Sino-European relations, past and present, and recent and ongoing global power shifts.

Edited by Enrico Fardella, Christian F. Ostermann, and Charles Kraus, Sino-European Relations during the Cold War and the Rise of a Multipolar World is the result an historic conference convened from June 29-July 1, 2012 in Palermo, Italy. For the first and last time, a group of veteran diplomatic officials, all active in Sino-European relations during the Cold War, assembled together with a group of international scholars in an effort to provide context to, and fill gaps in available documentary record, on China’s relationships with countries in Eastern and Western Europe from the 1960s through the 1980s. Though the dialogue at the conference often dealt with individual bilateral relationships between China and various European countries, the conference was anchored by a much broader theme: identifying the transition from bi-polarity to multi-polarity during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

With a foreword from Her Excellency Federica Mogherini, the volume features the transcript of the critical oral history conference proceedings as well as key primary source documents from international archives (including China, Albania, Germany, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Romania) and a comprehensive bibliography on Sino-European relations.

The editors gratefully acknowledge the indispensable financial support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Chicago), the Roma Mediterraneo Foundation (Rome),  the Center for Cold War International History Studies of the East China Normal University (Shanghai), and the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies (Florence), as well as the intellectual contributions of dozens of scholars and veteran policymakers who participated in the conference in Palermo.