In the first presentation, Laura De Giorgi will explore the encounter of economist and Italian Communist Party (ICP) member, Giuseppe Regis, with Maoist China between 1957 and 1961. Regis’ task was to investigate the prospects for, and ultimately foster, economic exchanges between Italian enterprises and cooperatives affiliated with the ICP and China during a period when diplomatic relations between Italy and the People’s Republic were severed. Most Sino-Italian contacts and dialogue took place within the framework of Cold War unofficial diplomacy. His personal journal, unpublished to date, provides insights into his role as an intermediary between the PRC’s economic and foreign policy organisations and the Italian Communist Party, as well as the challenges of living as a foreign expert in Cold War Beijing. It reveals how the Cold War context of Western and Chinese relations shaped the private and public lives of those who ventured to cross the Bamboo Curtain.

In the second presentation, Bruno Pierri will suggest that trade and Soviet containment buttressed the budding economic links between communist China and the capitalist West between 1977 and 1980. Archival documentation shows that the UK and US governments coordinated to capitalise on, and widen, the Sino-Soviet split. Within a relatively short span of time, the balance of power in East Asia had been reversed. Beijing’s market was too big to be ignored, and the two North Atlantic allies collaborated, and eventually competed, to allow mainland China access to the temples of world finance. What Western governments had not realised was that the People’s Republic would never pursue full alignment with them. On the contrary, increased trading and financial linkages with capitalist countries allowed the new Asian giant to gain leverage to play Western interlocutors off against each other.