When analyzing the policies of the John F. Kennedy administration towards the People’s Republic of China, previous historians have focused on the lack of substantive change, emphasizing the continuity of action with the prior polices of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. At the same time, a number of historians have noted that it was during the years Kennedy was in office that a majority of the American people began viewing communist China as a greater threat to world peace than the Soviet Union. However, none have sought to explain this sizeable shift in public opinion, or analyze its potential impact on policy. This thesis incorporates archival materials with contemporary print and visual media to make a connection between the sources of public opinion shifts and a change in the assumptions upon which U.S. China policy was based. Almost from the moment the new president assumed office, Robert Komer at the National Security Council and Chester Bowles at the State Department began pushing for changes in China policy based on the assumptions that the communist regime was not a “passing phase,” would only become more powerful and over time constitute an inexorable greater threat to U.S. interests in Asia, and that rapprochement, rather than isolation, was the best means of ameliorating this threat. Together with James Thomson, Roger Hilsman, and eventually Walt Rostow, they pushed for the adoption of what A. Doak Barnett would later term “Containment Without Isolation.” While the Sino-Soviet split accentuated charges of Chinese anti-white racism and the Great Leap Forward reinforced the sense of Mao’s irrationality, the Sino-Indian War confirmed both rising Chinese power and their leadership’s capacity for rational calculation. Meanwhile, in the popular culture, particularly motion pictures, the Yellow Peril enjoyed a revival as Chinese villains stepped to the fore, beginning to free themselves of their Soviet masters. However, while foreign Chinese were feared as never before, Chinese in America gained new acceptance. Laying the groundwork for the next five decades of China policy and enemy images, Kennedy’s Thousand Days constituted a turning point.

The study deals with the Sino-Romanian political, diplomatic, economic, technological and cultural ties from the very beginning in 1880, to this day. It precisely attempts to illustrate how, following Romania's bitter transition to democracy in 1989 and during its process of Westernisation and presence in a global context for internationalisation, the Sino-Romanian bilateral relationship has undoubtedly deteriorated, in comparison to the period prior to the revolution when the two countries’ constantly expanding bilateral political and economic partnership, as well as their public support, enabled Bucharest to attenuate the Soviet economic pressure, to improve its autonomous policy towards the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to undergo processes that resulted in the Romanian Communist Party sharing brotherly relations with the Communist Party of China in the 1970s. The research investigated the Romanian anti-communist revolution of December 1989 as the watershed for the Sino-Romanian relationship as, in the wake of those events, China embarked on the road of becoming a global superpower while the government in Bucharest, struggling economically, politically and socially to cope with the reverberations of the regime change, utterly disregarded the Asian capital’s economic and military potential as well as diplomatic influence in the international arena, and eventually turned its eyes to the West. The work emphasised that, when compared to other CEECs trade with China, Romania only ranked 5th, preceded by Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, suggesting that previous academic research - that placed emphasis on the traditional friendly relations which the two countries have shared since the 1960s and that has yielded, beginning with the 2000s, to a steady development of the Sino- Romanian pragmatic cooperation - and statements of (former) diplomats or experts working in the field - that tend to overemphasise the outcomes of the bilateral ties between Romania and China in the 2000s - are either too optimistic, or unfounded. The research established that the lessening of the Sino-Romanian collaboration after 1989 resides in Bucharest leadership’s inefficiency in developing a strategic partnership with Beijing subsequent to Romania’s accession to NATO (2004) and the EU (2007) and in their hesitation in capitalising on the rising Chinese economic presence in CEE since the beginning of the new millennium.:I. Introduction II. Historical background and Sino-Romanian earliest ties III. Sino-Romanian relations 1949-1969 IV. Sino-Romanian relations 1969-1989 V. Sino-Romanian relations 1989-2004 VI. Sino-Romanian relations 2004-2016 VII. Conclusion Annexes Bibliography

The Sino-Soviet Split of the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s was a multidimensional crisis of nationalism, national interests, domestic politics, personal problems, cultural differences, border issues, Soviet-American détente, communication misunderstanding, and different interpretations of ideology. The goal of this diploma thesis is to analyse the important domestic and foreign factors which contributed to the worsening of Sino-Soviet relations. In this interdisciplinary study, the author wants to over bridge the differences between Diplomatic History and International Relations Theory, the subfields of History and Political Science. In the first part, there is an analysis of current Sino-Soviet Split historiography (Lorenz Lüthi, Sergey Radchenko, Xia Yafeng, Austin Jersild) by using theories of International Relations (liberalism, realism and constructivism). The second part provides a historical description of the Sino-Soviet Split. Emphasis is placed on the Chinese side and especially regarding the role of Mao Zedong. This thesis focuses on the period between 1958 and 1964, nevertheless it is neccessary to include preceding and subsequent phases of the relations. It is essential due to cultural, ideological and national factors. These factors endured a long time and it would be impossible to...

This thesis discusses the role of Czechoslovakia within the framework of the Chinese- Soviet split. Based on the analysis of archival sources, it explores Czechoslovak proceedings within the given issue at the diplomatic level as well as the Communist Party level. Its aim is to confirm or disprove the statement that Czechoslovakia was a so-called small player in this dispute and acted more independently on the USSR policy . It focuses on mutual Czechoslovak-Chinese relations and their development in the given period, i.e. 1950-1969. It analyzes the progress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from its viewpoint at international conferences of Communist and workers' organizations, but also at Party sessions. The thesis also describes the Chinese-Soviet split in the Third World and its influence on Czechoslovak policy. Last but not least, the thesis focuses on the factors that influenced the formation of the Czechoslovak attitude on this issue. The thesis studies given range of issues with the help of archival sources of Czech provenance and foreign materials available in electronic form.

Abstract The thesis deals with the US foreign policy under Richard Nixon. More specifically, it examines the US rapprochement with Communist China (PRC) and the triangular diplomatic relations between the US, USSR, and PRC. The thesis draws from the realist theories, particularly the offensive and defensive branches of neorealism represented by John Mearsheimer and Kenneth Waltz. The thesis applies the theoretical concept of wedging strategies as power-balancing tools on the selected US foreign policy. The thesis conducts a qualitative case study using the process-tracing method. A causal mechanism derived from the concept of wedging strategies is theorized and further applied in the analysis. The analysis of the US foreign policy towards China examines the individual traces in the theorized mechanisms. The results of the study show that the US broke the Sino-Soviet alliance using a defensive wedging strategy by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split, resulting in PRC's dealignment with the USSR. The US reapproached the PRC and swayed the Chinese leadership with strategic guarantees tacitly aimed against the USSR. These guarantees were ultimately projected into the Shanghai Communique of 1972.