Here are a variety of articles found in the Internet about this subject, including one directly from the Star Trek website.  Because of this, I've decided to restore the Romulan/Chinese analogy. 
 http://www.itaweb.it/startrek/papers/coldwar.html 

 http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Shinzon 

 http://scifi.about.com/od/reviews/a/kirshararev.htm 

 http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/community/chat/archive/transcript/1355.html 

 http://hypatia.slashcity.org/trekshack/racetrk1.html