Beyond the Kremlin’s reach? Eastern Europe and China in the Cold War era

Abstract

This special issue examines relations between the People's Republic of China and socialist Eastern European states during the Cold War. By focusing on transfers and interconnections, and on the social dimension of governmental interactions, our main goal is to explore structures, institutions and spaces of interaction between China and Eastern Europe and their potential autonomy from political conjunctures. The guiding question we raise is: To what degree did Chinese and Eastern European players beyond the centres of power have room to manoeuvre outside the agendas of the Kremlin, national governments or party leadership?

Keywords:

• Sino-Soviet (bloc) relations
• socialist camp
• transnational history
• Cold War

Notes

¹ Liu Xiaoyuan’s review of Yafeng Xia, ‘The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 10.1 (Winter 2008): 81–115.

² The conference was made possible due to the generous support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Association for East European Studies (DGO), and the Centre for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University Shanghai.

³ David C. Engerman, ‘The Second World’s Third World,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 1 (2011): 183–211; Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalisation. The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

⁴ On the strategic triangle see: Lowell Dittmer, Sino-Soviet Normalisation and its International Implications, 1945–1990 (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1992); Robert S. Ross, ed., China, the United States, and the Soviet Union: Tripolarity and Policy Making in the Cold War (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); Michael M. Scheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University, 1997). On China’s relations with the Third World see: Chen Jian, ‘Bridging Revolution and Decolonization: The “Bandung Discourse” in China’s Early Cold War Experience’, Chinese Historical Review 15, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 207–41; Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Lorenz M. Lüthi, ‘The Sino-Soviet Split and its Consequences’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, eds. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 74–88; Chen Jian: ‘China’s Changing Policies Toward the Third World and the End of the Global Cold War’, in The End of the Cold War and the Third World, eds. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 101–21.

⁵ Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild, eds., Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Rachel Applebaum, ‘The Friendship Project: Socialist Internationalism in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s’, Slavic Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 484–507; Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2014); Michael David-Fox, ‘The Implications of Transnationalism’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 885–904; Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties. Crossing Borders in the Second World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013; Austin Jersild, ‘The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: “Catch Up and Surpass” in the Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950–1960’, The American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011): 109–34.

⁶ Shen Zhihua, Sulian zhuanjia zai Zhongguo (1948–1960) [Soviet Experts in China (1948–1960)] (Beijing: Zhongguo guoji chubanshe, 2003); Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). See also: Deborah Kaple, ‘Agents of Change. Soviet Advisers and High Stalinist Management in China, 1949–1960,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 18, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 5–30; William C. Kirby, ‘China’s Internationalisation in the Early People’s Republic: Dreams of a Socialist World Economy,’ The China Quarterly 188 (2006): 870–90; Baichun Zhang, Jiuchun Zhang & Fang Yao, ‘Technology Transfer from the Soviet Union to the People’s Republic of China 1949–1966,’ Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 4, no. 2 (August 2006): 105–71.

⁷ See, for example, the contributions in China from Without: Doing PRC History in Foreign Archives, eds. Arunabh Ghosh and Sören Urbansky, a special issue of The PRC History Review 2, no. 3 (June 2017).