Even though the People's Republic of China (PRC) and most Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries established diplomatic relations as early as in the year 1949, the Cold War had caused them to driftaway from each other. Before the dawn of the 21st century, the nations of the CEE region and the PRC dealt with their own development and domestic problems. Only the last decade brought in a new momentum to the bilateral relations between the two sides, thanks to common political and economic interests. After the new millennium, as the world's economic centre of gravity shifts to the East, the relations between Central and Eastern Europe and China started to strengthen. This shift was followed by the economic crisis, which drew even more attention to the potential of Chinese economic relationship for the countries of the region, as they started to see a possibility for a recovery from a recession in the expansion and deepening of relations with the emerging China.

When China launched its new cooperation program with Central and Eastern European countries, it also invigorated the research on the relation of the PRC and the CEE region: economic and political aspects and potentials of the relation have been touched upon several times by academic scholars, PhD students and journalists. Now, it is time to assess the relations between the CEE region and the PRC with a special emphasis on public perceptions of China among the next generation of the CEE leaders. The research was motivated by our assumption, that highlevel political relations have an impact on the perceptions of university students: better general political relations mean better understanding and acceptance among university students as well; furthermore, there is a positive correlation between the level and depth of economic cooperation between China and certain CEE countries and the attitude of university students toward China.

To thoroughly analyze the perceptions of China in the CEE countries, the paper presents the theory and literature on the topic, and provides an overview of the relations between China and the selected CEE countries, with a special emphasis on the general patterns. Following the description of the methodology, the paper's main section introduces the results of a public opinion survey conducted among Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak university students exclusively for this paper.