by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: June 26, 2009   Last Updated: May 29, 2010

In recent years, China has emerged from a deep internal focus to take its place as one of the world's largest economies, at the forefront of globalisation. Does this mark the end of the Cold War with the Western world? Did China in fact win the Cold War with th Western world by adopting economic tactics? Well, what was the Cold War, anyway?

The so-called Cold War is generally regarded as having begun within about two years of the end of the Second World War, and as having ended around 1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and so on. The Cold War was in essence a state of constant diplomatic tension between the USSR and the USA, between communism and capitalism, between East and West. By a series of diplomatic miracles it never quite erupted into a full-scale war, but the world saw many proxy wars where the same ideologies were fought out in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and so on. Many of the world's current political hot spots, including Afghanistan and the Middle East, are a direct result of US or Soviet interference in Cold War era conflicts.

But where is China's part in all of this? Was Communist China part of the Cold War? And if so, has China won? Hard to say.

Mao Zedong's victory over Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang in the late 1940s sent shockwaves through the international community. Right-wing commentators saw Communism as an ideological, economic and military threat that could sweep across continents, and preached a policy of 'containment', pledging to stop the spread of communism by refusing to allow it to take over further nations, combatting the ideology with funding of right-wing forces, huge dollar grants to governments to shore up their countries against threat by revolutionary factions and, in extreme cases, military action. The theory went that there was a 'domino effect' where if one country fell to Soviet influence, it would quickly result in its neighbours also turning 'Red'.

The arrival of a Communist regime in China seemed to vindicate these theories, and the country's sheer size terrified the West. The US refused to acknowledge the new state for many years, even keeping the Kuomintang's permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council despite the fact that the nationalist regime was reduced to ruling Fomosa, or Taiwan.

But as Mao's China became ever more isolationist and introverted, it is hard to say that the nation was ever a major

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