The journal is lucky to have gathered a set of outstanding articles on the relationship between the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping and European governments towards the end of the Cold War era. Taken together, the articles show how significant Europe was in the recalibration of Chinese foreign policy after the end of the Maoist epoch. This significance had two main causes. The first was that Deng and other Chinese leaders hoped that China could acquire technology and markets in Europe that would make the country less dependent on the United States as Beijing’s renewed modernisation process took hold. The other was that China had an intrinsic interest in the fate of the socialist countries in Europe. Although Beijing and Moscow by 1978 had been at loggerheads ideologically and strategically for almost two decades, the Chinese leaders had never given up on the idea of the reconstitution of a global socialist community in which they themselves would play a leading role.
China’s late 20th century relationship with Europe emerged from a long period dominated by conflict but also mutual attraction. European countries, and especially Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, had since the mid-19th century attempted to control and exploit China for their own purposes. Generations of Chinese leaders had formed their world-view in opposition to European imperialism. But they were also fascinated by European technology, ideologies, and state-building efforts. For many of them, Europe and the United States symbolised the power and capabilities they wanted to acquire for China.
The Chinese mix of resentment and admiration for Europe came to the fore in the years after World War I, when thousands of young Chinese came to work or study in faraway places. Many of the leaders who came to power in the late 1970s had spent time in Europe, including Deng Xiaoping himself, who spent five years in France. Nie Rongzhen, Deng’s closest military adviser and the organiser of China’s nuclear programme, had studied engineering in Belgium. Common for all of them was a need to draw on the European experience to improve China, while resisting foreign attempts at dominating their country. It is also important that for all of them, these years in Europe, mainly in the 1920s, were their only experience of living abroad before they took over running China in the 1970s.
Often ignored by students of the Sino-European relationship is the significance in the minds of Chinese Communists of them having taken on a European political theory to help shape the future of China. The fact that the People’s Republic of China was (and still is) based on the teachings of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, links Europe and China in ways that are often too plentiful to see clearly. Although Chinese Communist practice after 1949 was specifically modelled on the Soviet Union and Stalin, it was in its essence an attempt at ‘Europeanising’ China in economic and technological terms. And although the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were acutely aware that much of the global strategic momentum had moved from the former European colonial powers towards the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945, they still believed that Europe was a key area of interest, not least because of the Cold War conflict there.
By 1978, when China had re-ignited its search for modernity after the disasters of the late Maoist era, Europe was therefore not just a central part of its leadership’s experience, but it also one of the few regions where it could look for contemporary inspiration. In terms of technology and trade the focus was almost entirely on capitalist western Europe, as the articles by Enrico Fardella and Chi-kwan Mark show. But the new Chinese leaders, headed by Deng Xiaoping, could not afford to ignore socialist eastern Europe either. In terms of lessons for China’s future, in the years immediately after 1978 they were particularly interested in Yugoslavia’s experiments with industrial cooperatives and workers’ self-management. But by the early 1980s they were also contemplating repairing relations with the other eastern Europeans socialist states, even though these initiatives were driven more by strategic concerns than by any attempt at drawing lessons for China’s domestic development.
All discussion of China’s foreign relations during the late Cold War has to take into consideration the country’s over-arching international conflict: The confrontation with the Soviet Union. After the spectacular collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance in the early 1960s, the two countries had become deadly enemies, and during the late Maoist years and immediately thereafter Chinese anti-Sovietism bordered on an obsession. It is possible, as Vladislav Zubok indicates, that the Chinese leadership by 1983 had realised that the narrative of Soviet rise/US decline that Deng had taken over from Mao was not necessarily correct. But, as Zubok shows, old habits die hard, especially when whole political careers had been built on them. In addition to caution, mistrust, and inertia, there were real conflicts between the two sides over Asian matters: Mongolia, Indochina, and Afghanistan. And Deng was smart enough to understand that any form of open fraternisation with the Soviets would endanger his vital alliance, that with the United States, at a point when the Cold War seemed to be intensifying rather than receding. In practice, very little happened in the Sino-Soviet relationship before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow in 1985. Even after that, as Zubok points out – supporting the views of Sergey Radchenko in a recent book – the proceeds of the gradual decline in Sino-Soviet tension were limited for both sides.Footnote1
The Sino-Soviet conflict also limited how far eastern European countries within the Soviet orbit could go in improving their relations with post-Mao China. Romania went the furthest, as befitted its relative independence from Moscow in foreign affairs. East Germany and Hungary tried to establish some kind of connection with Beijing (but for somewhat different reasons: Honecker admired Chinese authoritarianism, while the Hungarians were looking for trade benefits). For Poland, as Małgorzata Gnoinska shows, the limits of relations with the Chinese were set by the Warsaw leaders’ loyalty to Moscow before, during, and after the imposition of martial law in 1981. Interestingly enough, Beijing made clear its preference for General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s dictatorship over any alternative early on during the Polish crisis, thereby, as Gnoinska puts it, attempting to show that ‘the perseverance of Communist ideology took precedence over any differences with regards to its implementation.’ This view from Beijing of course foreshadowed the attitudes of the most retrograde Communists in eastern Europe in support of Deng Xiaoping’s decision to use arms against his own people in June 1989. By then Poland was the lucky exception. It held its first free election on the same day that Chinese soldiers started firing on crowds in Beijing.
Sino-British relations are in a way the odd case here, because of the need to negotiate workable arrangements for the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. Chi-kwan Mark shows how Margaret Thatcher kept complaining about having to transfer the colony to China, but also how she realised that the takeover was necessary both in terms of the end of the lease of the New Territories and because of Cold War realities. Thatcher could not create a crisis with China, Washington’s precious partner, just as the Cold War was heating up again. Mark’s article does indicate, however, that Thatcher’s aims in dealing with China increased as she got to know the domestic reform process that Deng had initiated better and that she, with usual grandeur, came to believe that Britain and she herself could help guide the Chinese in economic matters through successfully implementing the process of the handover of Hong Kong. In this, as in most of her more grandiose aims, Thatcher most certainly failed, even though it can be argued that the negotiations in themselves paved the way for a decade of increasingly close commercial relations between Britain and China.
In overall terms, relations between Europe and China in the late 20th century are much in need of attention by historians. These articles provide excellent starting points for further research, which hopefully can be complemented when China’s own archives become more open for investigation than what they are today.
Notes
1 Sergey Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).