During the Cold War in the 1950s, then United States Secretary of State Frank Foster Dulles coined the phrase "peaceful evolution" which, despite its pacific-sounding words, is an attempt to infiltrate and subvert a country via non-military means. This was Washington's ploy to spread Western political ideas and lifestyles to nudge communist dictatorships into evolving into democracies.
Staunchly anti-communist, Mr Dulles refused to shake the hand of then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina.
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