The China market: East German and Bulgarian industrial facility export to the PRC in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

Alongside the Soviet Union, partner countries on the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) substantially contributed to a decade of industrialization in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the 1950s. This article looks at East German and Bulgarian industrial projects in China in the realm of the extraction and refinement of basic materials. What was the impact of such exchanges on small CMEA economies as suppliers of industrial goods? What were the rationales of the participating institutions and protagonists in promoting industrial exports to China? All differences between the industrialized German Democratic Republic and the still mostly agrarian People’s Republic of Bulgaria (NRB) notwithstanding, economic officials in both countries saw the PRC as a crucial market for utilizing industrial capacities and increasing export opportunities. The immense significance that was ascribed to industrial exports to China also left its imprint on the structure of the economic bureaucracy, with the foundation of special bureaus and new foreign trade enterprises. Arguing that the Soviet Union’s CMEA partners had their own interests to pursue relations with China, this article aims to nuance a discussion where the alliance’s limits and eventual failure dominate the scene.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War economy
• Sino–Soviet alliance
• socialist camp
• foreign trade
• industrialization

Introduction

In the past, when Bulgaria was entangled with the capitalist powers’ network of interest, like every other small country with the same fate, it did not have the opportunity to maintain trade relations with such a rich, but far away, country like China. Occasionally, capitalist firms brought Chinese tea and some spices as so-called ‘colonial goods’ to the Bulgarian market, where they bore witness to the existence of the far-away Chinese people. Conversely, there was no Bulgarian merchandise that would have reached the Chinese people. Back then, Bulgaria was a backward agrarian country and could not produce anything that could have been sold on the Chinese market. Today, things have changed fundamentally. (‘Ausdehnung des Güterhandels zwischen der VR Bulgarien und der VR China’, Bulgarischer Außenhandel, 1954, no. 2)

With the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, economic planners throughout Eastern Europe saw that ‘a land with great production and trading opportunities’¹ had become part of the socialist world. The new government under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committed itself to building hundreds of factories in a few years. With the United Nations (UN) embargo against the PRC, a reaction to the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, it became clear that the socialist states in Eastern Europe would become the exclusive suppliers for this industrialization project. These circumstances promised large-scale exchanges and a new level of interconnectedness with a ‘far away country’. Eventually, the exchanges remained temporary and ended shortly after the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, but this had been anything but evident a few years before, in 1949 when the PRC was founded, or in 1953 when the realization of the PRC’s First Five Year Plan started.

During the short-lived alliance, substantial exchanges did happen. In addition to the large-scale Soviet projects in steel, defence and machine-building, a vast array of engineers from the USSR’s Eastern European partner states assisted industrial projects in the PRC. In summation, the Soviet and other CMEA states’ projects substantially contributed to a decade of industrialization and immense growth in the PRC. But what impact did these exchanges have on the CMEA countries as the suppliers of industrial goods? What were the rationales of the protagonists and participating institutions in promoting industrial exports to China?

To address these questions the article focuses on economic officials who were assigned to devise and implement the exchanges with the PRC. They saw the PRC as an export market and declared – next to the import of necessary foodstuffs and industrial raw materials – capacity utilization for domestic industries and the acquisition of future markets as main benefits from exchanges with China – similar to how US experts framed the opportunities of the ‘China Market’ in the 19^th century.² The article argues, first, that these economic rationales were an important motive for why officials drove the industrial projects in China further. Second, the industrial projects’ economic importance is also visible in the considerable repercussions they had on the supplying countries: they served as a catalyst for restructuring the East German and Bulgarian economic bureaucracies and had a preparatory function for further inroads into foreign, mostly Third World, markets. As a third point, the formulation of these economic rationales in East Central European bureaucracies also shows that these countries had their own interests in maintaining relations with China. These were more than a proxy for Soviet interests. The asynchronous development of Sino-Eastern European relations in comparison to Soviet policies – Eastern European countries stopped industrial cooperation later and re-entered active trade policy towards China earlier than the Soviets – was underpinned by the formulation of these perspectives and rationales inside the economic bureaucracies.

To be sure, economic rationales were not the only (f)actors at play in Sino-Eastern European relations. Governments and party leaderships in East Central and South Eastern Europe had to react to hegemonic Soviet policies, were influenced by the PRC’s differentiation strategy aimed for challenging the Soviet Union’s leading role in the socialist camp, and always considered internal leadership competition and regime stability.³ A shift of the focus away from these top leadership geopolitics that dominate the literature on state socialism in the Global Cold War reveals that economic rationales also had a significant influence on the allocation of resources and, accordingly, on economic development.

As examples, the article takes two Soviet partner countries, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, into the spotlight. The contributions of the different socialist states to China’s industrialization were different in scope. Whereas the more industrialized countries entered substantial exchanges with the PRC, above all the Soviet Union, the GDR, Poland and Czechoslovakia, with other countries like Hungary, Bulgaria, and during the 1950s also Albania, trade and technical exchanges remained on a rather minor level. By discussing the GDR and Bulgaria this article attempts to cover both ends of the spectrum.

The GDR was the most industrialized country in the Soviet Bloc and could offer advanced equipment, most importantly in the fields of machine-building, the chemical industry and radio transmission, as well as in the cement, sugar and textile industries.⁴ Bulgaria was (apart from the special case of Albania) the CMEA’s least developed country. At the same time as the PRC, it was subject to a similar – albeit much smaller in scale – Bloc-wide socialist industrialization project. Soviet, as well as East German and Czechoslovakian, engineers went to Bulgaria to build factories and the country saw enormous growth in the early post-war decades. In the first half of the 1950s, exports to China played a negligible role, but with the growing industrial potential in Bulgaria, the PRC became relevant as a market for industrial equipment. Bulgarian engineers built two non-ferrous metallurgy plants and a few smaller power stations in the PRC. These transfers were still numerically minor, but had consequences for the structure of Bulgarian foreign trade, as this article will show.

With an emphasis on the value of the Sino-Soviet alliance for certain players, this article is meant to nuance a discussion where the alliance’s failures and limits dominate the scene. The literature on Sino-Soviet technology exchanges in Western languages consists of a handful of studies, which concentrate to a large degree on specialists on the ground and their life experiences.⁵ This article is meant to contribute to exploring the middle ground between Krushchev (or Stalin) and Mao on the one hand and the technical specialists travelling from Eastern Europe to China on the other, by focusing on officials in ministries, state plan commissions and expert committees in smaller Soviet Bloc countries who ran the exchanges with China.

In a broader perspective, the article also relates to the more general discussion of socialist states’ foreign economic relations beyond and in the CMEA. Having started from a new interpretation of East–South relations, global history approaches have increasingly begun to reconsider the Soviet Bloc itself.⁶ In contrast to the more traditional literature on power relations in the CMEA, which saw the agrarian, industrializing countries as being unsatisfied with their assigned role as deliverers of fresh produce and raw materials in the CMEA, the more recent research shows that Bulgaria was able to capitalize on the CMEA division of labour even if long-standing technology- and capital-based hierarchies were not done away with.⁷ This article shows that the cooperation with China helped Bulgaria become an exporter of industrial facilities in the late 1950s and seeks to integrate this development into the picture of the international political economy of the Soviet Bloc.

The article is based on sources from the institutions involved in the industrial projects on the East German and Bulgarian side: the state plan commissions and their bureaus for economic and scientific-technical cooperation; the heavy industry ministries and their departments for international relations; the foreign trade ministries and the corresponding foreign trade organizations – Metalimport, Tekhnoimpeks and VEB Anlagenexport; the office of the GDR heavy industry minister and later vice premier Fritz Selbmann; the funds of the Bulgarian planning institute for mines and factories Minproekt and the East German cement-facility exporter VEB Zementanlagenbau, as well as the correspondence and reports of East German coal experts. These documents can be found at the Bulgarian State Archive (Tsentralen Dӑrzhaven Arkhiv- TSDA), the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv BArch), the Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt (LASA) and the Archive of the Technical University ‘Bergakademie’ Freiberg (UaF).

The first section examines the general trade patterns between the PRC and the two countries at the time and explains what the Eastern European suppliers of industrial goods received in return. The second part examines specific industrial projects more closely and delineates how they shaped the economic bureaucracies in the small CMEA countries, showing the significance of China trade for the two countries. The third section uncovers the rationales of the institutions and protagonists involved in these exchanges and argues that market extension, industrialization of export portfolios and domestic capacity utilization were the economic officials’ main motives for promoting exchanges with the PRC.

Patterns of East Germany’s and Bulgaria’s trade with the PRC

The economic exchanges in the framework of the Sino-Soviet alliance were of great significance for China and Eastern European countries alike. The Soviet Union and China were each other’s most important trading partners in the 1950s. The other European socialist states’ individual contributions to Chinese industrialization were much smaller than the Soviets’ part, but in sum they were considerable. The Soviet partner states’ investments combined accounted for 18% of the costs of industrial projects during the Sino-Soviet alliance.⁸ They also held a considerable share in Chinese foreign trade, fluctuating between 10% and 20% altogether.⁹

However, the concrete significance of the China trade varied for single states. Mostly, the industrialized CMEA countries were able to sell a sizable amount of industrial equipment to China. China ranked third and fourth as trading partner for Poland and Czechoslovakia respectively for most of the 1950s. Hungary, in contrast, could not meet its high expectations, as trade relations and technical cooperation with the PRC remained rather negligible.¹⁰ For Bulgaria, the picture, measured in numbers, is ambivalent. In the second half of the 1950s, the PRC contributed 1.5% to 2.5% of Bulgaria’s overall foreign trade turnover, which may appear minor, but meant that China figured among the NRB’s 10 most important trading partners.

In GDR trade statistics the PRC ranked fourth in 1954/5, behind only the Soviet Union, West Germany and Poland, and from 1956 to 1960 fifth behind, additionally, Czechoslovakia.¹¹ In 1960, the first year in which the impact of the split could be felt, East German exports and imports to China combined were still 830 million Valutamark – one tenth of the value of goods the GDR exchanged with the Soviet Union. During the 1960s it was further reduced but remained relevant.¹²

In general, Sino-Eastern European trade was dominated by the exchange of raw materials, agricultural products and light industry goods, delivered by the Chinese, for heavy industry goods from Eastern Europe.¹³ Even the Bulgarian export portfolio to the PRC became ‘industrialized’ during the 1950s. However, Eastern European exports consisted of more than industrial equipment. Goods that figured prominently were those from industries that had sharply increased production after the implementation of the first Five-Year Plans. For example, in Bulgaria, with Soviet help, a relatively large chemical industry had been built up, not least in the socialist model town of Dimitrovgrad. Accordingly, Bulgarian foreign traders constantly offered chemical fertilizer to the PRC, whose agricultural sector was much larger than Bulgaria’s few thousand farms.¹⁴ In 1957, Bulgaria additionally exported blocks of lead, zinc and iron (that is refined, but not further processed, metals), harvesters, ploughs and spare parts for tractors, and cotton cloth.¹⁵

The whole exchange only made sense if the Eastern European states’ exports were compensated adequately. So, what did Bulgaria and the GDR get for the factories, machines and other export goods they sold? As mentioned, both states needed food for people and animals, so they bought foodstuffs like soy and all kinds of plant-based oils. Because the food supply situation was tense in Eastern Europe as well as in China, deliveries in this field had a political sensitivity and were often interpreted as a gesture of friendship.¹⁶ In 1959, for example, the GDR leadership even sent a delegation under high-profile party official Hermann Matern to Beijing to ensure the delivery of necessary ingredients for East German margarine production and virtually claimed that these deliveries were crucial for the survival of the socialist camp.¹⁷ Based on its structure – machinery vs. raw materials – one may suppose a protracted trade deficit on the Chinese side. Indeed, the PRC’s trade balance with the GDR in the second half of the 1950s showed a deficit until 1959. Because of the GDR’s large demand for foodstuffs and consumption goods the Chinese deficit towards the GDR was not persistent, and the numbers in different sources are ambiguous and controversial.¹⁸

Of an importance similar to foodstuffs were raw materials for industrial production from China. Bulgaria and East Germany especially sought metallurgical ores and inputs for textile industries from wool to cotton. With respect to metallurgical ores and minerals, the GDR and Bulgaria needed raw materials for various industrial sectors. Non-ferrous metals, like tungsten, zinc, tin, lead and antimony were highly attractive. They had been declared a scarce good at CMEA’s restart session after Stalin’s death in June 1954 in Moscow.¹⁹ Subsequently, East German and Bulgarian officials negotiated in China for the importation of as much of these metals as possible. In turn, both states offered to assist the erection of extraction and refinement industries for the needed raw materials, in the hope that they could purchase a part of the product. Bulgaria built its first enterprises abroad in the form of two non-ferrous metal factories that will be discussed below. GDR officials formulated the goal of doing the same.²⁰ The mineral borax, for example, gained special attention, since the GDR needed it for its porcelain manufacturers as well as for its optical and precision machinery industry. Both sectors produced hard currency income and the latter was also of strategic significance. The raw material fell under the Western embargo against the Soviet Bloc, and its trade was important enough that in 1959 Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl personally wrote to Zhou Enlai to ensure Chinese deliveries.²¹ The two trading partners negotiated a cooperation in the identification and exploitation of borax and the delivery of a specific facility for mining and refinement from the GDR.²²

With respect to cotton, for most of the 1950s, China was an important deliverer for Bulgarian industries, ranking between second and fifth among foreign cotton providers.²³ Partly, these deliveries were not Chinese cotton, but re-exported Egyptian cotton.²⁴ The narrow corset of bilateral clearing agreements and the dollar shortage made such kinds of re-export and compensation deals involving third parties necessary. Re-exports and trilateral compensation were common phenomena in the post-war international socialist (and non-socialist) trade, and they were present in the Sino-Eastern European exchanges too. For example, Eastern Bloc states hoped to purchase natural rubber from Southeast Asia through Chinese foreign trade structures. In 1961, Bulgarian trade officials celebrated a deal to trade chemical fertilizer for rubber, which they calculated to have saved Bulgaria US$1.116 million.²⁵ East German trade bureaucrats thanked the Chinese government in 1957 for deliveries of rubber and coffee from Asian markets, which they otherwise ‘could not reach’.²⁶ Eastern Europeans also bought goods from the PRC with the aim of exporting them later for hard currency, one such example being Bulgarian purchases of tea and animal products for re-export to the ‘capitalist abroad’.²⁷

By the late 1950s, textiles replaced foodstuffs and raw materials as the largest group of goods among Chinese exports to Soviet Bloc countries. That is, the cotton was not sold unrefined anymore, but after spinning or after weaving, in the form of yarn or cloth.²⁸ In its export offensive of the late 1950s, the PRC rose to third place in the world as textile exporter, with the goal of repaying credit, mostly for machinery imports from socialist partner states. While foodstuffs became more and more scarce around 1960 and their export was massively reduced, the new role of textiles as the dominant export good was further strengthened.²⁹

Supplying the population with consumption goods was an important driver of this trade, but Western markets and currencies were always on the minds of Eastern European traders in China as well. Crucial imports from China either saved hard currency as they functioned as a substitute for imports from capitalist countries, or they earned hard currency when they were re-exported. The next sections will show that there were additional rationales behind the decisions for these exchanges – namely industrial capacity utilization and export market development.

The impact of the China market: industrial facility exports and their repercussions

That the massive technology transfer in the framework of the Sino-Soviet alliance had a great impact on China is well known.³⁰ However, it also had an important impact on Eastern Europe. The projects and technical assistance of CMEA states in China not only supported the industrialization project there, but also produced repercussions for the exporters of know-how and industrial facilities. This section examines the procedures of industrial exports more closely, to find out how they influenced the development of economic bureaucracies in CMEA countries. GDR and Bulgarian traders, specialists and policymakers hoped that China would become a large and long-term outlet market for industrial equipment. The size of this market would help to make their industrial facility export, and its structures, more competitive on a global scale. Both economic bureaucracies adapted to the potentials of the PRC as a market, and reformed their bureaucratic apparatuses accordingly, as this section will show.

The export of complete facilities in turnkey projects is a very special sector. It requires long-term planning and complex coordination, and when the deal is done, the recipient will in many cases be dependent on further technical assistance from the seller. On the one hand, the longevity of the investment cycle, before the added value can be turned into economic benefits, is certainly a disadvantage. On the other hand, the longevity of the economic connection built through export of complex industrial equipment can be an advantage for the supplying side because it promises the creation of a network and the increased compatibility between distant industries makes future exchange more likely. As we will see in the next section, this was what socialist economic planners formulated as a goal.

The characteristics of trade with complete industrial facilities brought along specific problems in the context of state socialist trade patterns. Eastern European states tried for years to achieve long-term trade agreements, while the PRC preferred to be able to adapt its exports to developments in domestic consumption markets on short notice. This opposition is condensed in an East German trade official’s statement that ‘one cannot build complete factories based on annual contracts only’.³¹ The search for the right pricing for such sophisticated deals was especially delicate for state socialist negotiators. Willingly or not, East–East traders had to base their price system in capitalist world market prices; the more complex the product the more difficult these prices were to determine, not least with regard to quality and standards.³² Additionally, negotiations about which parts of the work would be assigned to the receiving (Chinese) side further complicated these deals.³³ The more factories East German and other Eastern European countries built, the more tasks would be taken over by the Chinese – from basic construction to delivering machine tools and, finally, assembly.³⁴

Notwithstanding such difficulties, East German foreign traders followed a general rationale of expanding the export of industrial facilities. China played the key role in this plan in the second half of the 1950s. East German trade analysts asserted a paradigmatic change in GDR exports to China during the first half of the 1950s. From a vast amount of small single orders for machines and machinery parts, the deliveries increasingly shifted towards exports of larger equipment complexes and complete plants. By 1956 complete industrial plants ranked second among the GDR machinery exports to China, behind transport means yet exceeding more than three to four times the export volume of mining/chemical machinery, general machine-building and optical instruments.³⁵

For the future, the equipment exporters had even greater plans. At the end of 1956, 83 industrial plants were projected to be built in China during the following years.³⁶ The experts in the heavy industry ministry taxed these industrial complexes at a worth of more than 3 billion Marks.³⁷ Not all of the plants were realized, but 39 of them were.³⁸ The most famous and best researched among these projects are the machine tool factory in Zhengzhou and the radio equipment factory in Beijing. Furthermore, the East Germans built sugar factories, cotton spinning mills, chemical plants for fertilizer production, factories for technical glass, power stations and cement factories.³⁹

By far the largest of the planned projects was the erection and modernization of two large factories for coal liquefaction. These were not built in the end, but still, the project shows the dynamics and the rationales behind the Sino-East German technology exchange. The GDR's natural resources consisted mostly of low-quality brown coal and the country had amassed a unique expertise in its refinement, to make it of use for more than just heating and electricity production. The Chinese were interested in all forms of coal refinement from briquetting to gas production and liquefaction, and they knew well that such expertise could be found in East Germany, not least because of its legacies from the Nazi war economy.⁴⁰

The first negotiations and planning for such a project had started in 1950, and before its cancellation in 1957, considerable knowledge was transferred in concomitant Scientific-Technical Cooperation decisions. Chinese engineers came to the GDR liquefaction plants in Leuna, Zeitz and Schwarzheide, and a delegation of high-profile GDR specialists went to the PRC and tested coal deposits for its qualities to figure out the best location for the liquefaction plant to be built. Networks that were useful in subsequent years were established. The GDR’s industrial exporters could capitalize on the knowledge East German specialists had gathered on coal fields in China for projects to build coal power stations. The Chinese side also assigned East German experts to test oil shale from the newly found deposits. These had contributed to the cancellation of the project by the Chinese in 1957 as the increased availability of oil made additional coal liquefaction superfluous.⁴¹

Projects that were smaller and less complex had better prospects of being realized, for example in the field of cement factories. The socialist regime in East Germany had inherited one of the global leaders in the production of equipment for the cement industry Polysius (from 1957 VEB Zementanlagenbau – VEB ZAB in the following) in Dessau, which had built its first cement plant in China in 1908.⁴² Its reputation as a proficient cement equipment producer gave it a position which meant that it was still able to attract orders from the West, but these were massively reduced in amount. As the demand for cement production equipment in East Germany was not large enough, a reorientation towards the newly socialist markets had been necessary.⁴³

The industrializing PRC was the largest among these markets. VEB ZAB built or equipped several complete cement factories there. One of these factories served a single construction site – the Soviet-assisted building of the giant Sanmenxia water dam at the Yellow River (Huang He) – which highlights the immense absorption capacity of the Chinese market for production goods.⁴⁴ When in 1963 all cement equipment exports to the PRC were stopped at once, the VEB ZAB lost ‘one of its most important clients’ and had a hard time finding new outlets for its China-centred production programme that had been running until the last minute.⁴⁵

The VEB ZAB as an enterprise had held an outstanding position in the GDR’s exports to China. Its directors personally went to the PRC to promote projects and took part in meetings with the Chinese Technical Import Cooperation.⁴⁶ Such a direct contact between production enterprise and other states’ foreign trade organizations was, in theory, not foreseen in the monopolistic foreign trade structures of 1950s socialist regimes. In practice, the necessity of bringing producer and buyer closer together, especially in the complex transactions of complete industrial facilities, led to demands for restructuring the foreign trade bureaucracy. The petitioners suggested taking out the general supplier VEB Inex and assigning the right to realize foreign trade deals directly to large machinery exporters like Polysius/VEB Zementanlagenbau, VEB Textima-Projekt Karl Marx-Stadt (textile machinery) and heavy machinery combine ‘Ernst Thälmann’ (SKET) in Magdeburg.⁴⁷

The extraordinary significance of China for expanding industrial facility export had further repercussions on the GDR’s economic bureaucracy. The officials of the Ministry for Heavy Industry saw in the amount, size and complexity of orders from the PRC ‘a starting point for an immediate change of the forms of planning, guiding and control of planning offices and production enterprises used hitherto for the export of complete industrial facilities’. They bemoaned the absence of long-term perspective and planning by the top leadership, which led to a situation wherein industrial branch ministries were inadequately informed, equipment parts were ordered from producers on short notice, and time pressures and delays were the norm. The conclusion of the officials was that ‘through the PRC’s orders for the period from 1956 to 1962 this situation can be changed to a large extent’,⁴⁸ through a reform of the foreign trade structure.

The officials proposed establishing a special China bureau inside the heavy machinery ministry’s department for the export of industrial complexes. The officials argued that for industrial facility export to China, cooperation with other socialist countries as well as purchases of equipment parts in capitalist countries would be necessary and would have to be coordinated in detail with the PRC organs. Accordingly, the vice minister for heavy machinery who gave the report suggested that the China bureau should open an office in the PRC and should invite Chinese officials to cooperate inside the bureau.⁴⁹ The conception of the bureau shows a bias towards a much closer interaction than a centrally controlled foreign trade monopoly may suggest. This conception was the result of a more general preference in the GDR economic bureaucracy to move the East German export structure towards industrial equipment, or even complete factories in turnkey projects, instead of the goods these machines would produce. The PRC was at the heart of these plans in the second half of the 1950s.

Similar to what happened in the GDR, in Bulgaria projects in China inspired a debate about opportunities to export industrial facilities and a change in the institutional structure of foreign trade. The plans were much more modest and the realized projects were of a smaller scale than the East German ones. It must be taken into consideration that this was a starting point: Bulgaria started from an economy dominated by agriculture after the war, and it had just begun to export complete industrial facilities.

In August 1956, the Chinese government announced the order of two objects for the extraction and enrichment of two non-ferrous metallurgy deposits, in Rong’an (Guanxi province, southern China) and Bajiazi (Liaoning, northeast); the Bulgarian side committed itself to plan, equip, assemble and put the two objects into operation.⁵⁰ These projects entailed close cooperation with Soviet structures. The projects had already been prepared by a cooperation of Chinese and Soviet experts before being transferred to the Bulgarians.⁵¹ At the technical level, Bulgarian positions occasionally diverged from Soviet patronage, as happened in the discussion about the type of tub to use in the mine. The Bulgarians had their own model, which they would have liked to integrate, but worried that they would have to change the whole project if the Chinese side ordered Soviet tubs, which the Chinese types were based on.⁵² More generally, though, the Minproekt engineers drew on knowledge in the socialist camp to determine the most efficient method for enrichment, not least based on the results of Chinese colleagues who had analysed the deposits’ materials.⁵³

When the deal was made, Minister for Foreign Trade Zhivko Zhivkov and Minister for Heavy Industry Tano Colov wrote a report to Prime Minister Anton Iugov in which they underlined the ground-breaking character of such a deal: ‘This is the first case of export of a large project of such a scale, which will occupy substantial forces of the ministry [of heavy industry] and which will confront it with serious and difficult tasks.’⁵⁴ They proposed restructuring the economic bureaucracy to be better prepared for this activity (dejnost), which is completely new for both, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the Ministry for Heavy Industry. Both ministries organizationally are not prepared and do not dispose of the necessary cadres to cope with these new and difficult tasks, the realisation of which would bring considerable benefits to our national economy.⁵⁵

Colov and Zhivkov proposed the foundation of a new body that would potentially be able to coordinate the assembly of industrial plants for export, from projections and buying material, to producing the necessary equipment, organizing the necessary travel and finally putting the factory into operation.⁵⁶ Otherwise, all these steps would have been dispersed over several different ministries and agencies.

Next to this body inside the Ministry for Heavy Industry, Colov and Zhivkov also suggested the foundation of a new foreign trade enterprise named Technoimpeks, which would deal specially with the export (and import) of industrial equipment and complete plants. In the corresponding application to the Council of Ministers the ministries for foreign trade and for heavy industry both demanded an enlargement of their staff for the industrial facility export. They stated that their proposals were ‘motivated by the existence of opportunities to export complete factories also to other countries’ and highlight that for three smaller projects in Syria, contracts were on their way as well.⁵⁷ The propagators of industrial export to China also pointed to future opportunities for similar projects in the PRC itself with the upcoming start of the second Five-Year Plan, as they identified a demand for energy stations as well as coal and non-ferrous metal enrichment.⁵⁸ The ‘China market’ was seen as a door opener for future deals with countries outside the socialist camp, which would bring hard currency revenues.

The former general director of the firm that had functioned as main contractor for the first facility exports to China, Metalimport, would become the General director of Technoimpeks, the new enterprise specializing in industrial facility export. Georgi Ivanov Stoev had been one of the specialists who travelled to China to complete the deal for the two factories. The China market here functioned as a catalyst in a general process of functional differentiation in Bulgaria’s foreign trade bureaucracy.⁵⁹

The projects in China left an imprint on the economic bureaucracies in Bulgaria and the GDR who – starting from the industrial exports to China – decentralized foreign trade to a certain extent and formed new foreign trade organizations. The economic officials promoting these exchanges had extensive hopes for the opportunities of the China market. The rationales behind these ambitions will be dealt with in the last section.

Neo-mercantilism and other rationales in socialist economic bureaucracies

Economic officials and technical specialists were part of the socialist bureaucracy and participated in decision-making and realization of industrial projects in China. Recent trends in research have shown that decision-making in socialist states did not simply flow out from the moods of a monolithic leadership, but can be better understood as a negotiation between competing strands of bureaucracies and other columns of power.⁶⁰ Following Elitza Stanoeva’s lead, this section shifts ‘the focus from the actors who held power to those who forged policies – concerning general strategies, long-term plans, priorities in foreign policy and economic cooperation’.⁶¹

In doing their jobs, economic officials and technical experts did not take an oppositional stance towards government and party leadership. Rather, they were part of the regime, but had their own power resources – in front of all their technological knowledge and international networks. The argumentations of these actors reveal motivations and rationales that left their mark on the decision-making around investment projects in China.

Economic bureaucrats in East Germany lobbied for closer cooperation with the PRC, even at a time when the Sino-Soviet split was already in the making. For example, in a report about the state and prospects for collaboration with China in January 1960, Walter Mostertz, a China specialist in the East German economic bureaucracy, depicted the potentials of a deepened collaboration in the form of a division of labour in certain fields, and even lobbied for CMEA membership for the PRC.⁶² Other crucial actors from the ministerial level promoted industrial projects in China, such as Minister for Heavy Industry Fritz Selbmann, a Communist Party activist in the pre-war era, who was a leading figure in the East German economy but never entered the politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED).

Why did these actors lobby for engagements in China? In the section above we have seen that a shift in the export structure towards investment goods was a strategic goal of economic officials from the industrialized GDR, and China was the ideal place for pursuing such an aim. In a report to Fritz Selbmann, officials from the Department of Export of Industrial Complexes argued that the number of projects in China would allow for a standardization of planning and exporting industrial complexes, which would enhance the GDR’s offers to other markets.⁶³ A long-term connection with the PRC was also identified as a positive effect. For example, at a preparatory meeting for the third session of the Bilateral Commission on Scientific-Technical Cooperation, state plan commission officials stated that industrial collaboration ‘would connect the Chinese industry with the country of origin [the GDR] and that country’s technical development, construction principles and cadres. This will lead to new orders and new assignments for facility construction.’⁶⁴

Another goal that was widely acknowledged in the East German economic bureaucracy was capacity utilization. Although starting from different levels of industrialization, all CMEA states had built up vast capacities for production of basic materials and machinery during the first Five-Year Plans. They needed outlets for these industries. Similarly, the bureaus for planning and designing industrial objects which had designed the factories of the first Five-Year plans needed work as well.⁶⁵

Getting a grasp on advanced technologies from the capitalist abroad was another goal that was explicitly formulated.⁶⁶ GDR officials routinely ordered machines and materials in the West (mostly West Germany and Western Europe) that had to be compensated by Chinese partners and obviously were used by the East Germans to increase their own knowledge. For example, in a 1957 list for GDR projects in China the costs for intermediate industrial goods to be paid in hard currency ranked from US$3114 for an Austrian hammer mechanism for a power station, to around 2 million Swiss Francs for the largest projects, namely the machine tool factory in Zhengzhou, the radio equipment factory in Beijing, and a laboratory for special steel types. For many projects, imports of special steel accounted for the bulk of the hard currency costs. Only for a few cases does the list indicate ‘no hard currency necessary’.⁶⁷

Similar rationales were also formulated for the field of Scientific-Technical Cooperation. This system of free technology transfer in the socialist camp was in many cases entangled with the export of industrial facilities. The gratuitous invitation of trainees from and the sending of specialists and blueprints to China helped enlarge compatibility and thus helped build up the economic network that factory export was based in. The GDR officials clearly defined the conditions under which they would or would not comply with the rules of free exchange of technological knowledge in the socialist world. In accordance with what enterprises repeatedly demanded, the GDR would avoid transferring technical knowledge that would endanger the export opportunities of its own enterprises – to China in particular.⁶⁸

Similarly, for Bulgarian officials it was also clear that markets had to be defended. In a report on the aforementioned industrial projects in China, the ministers for heavy industry and foreign trade stated together that delivering facilities of bad quality would not only be “a moral-political disgrace for our country and its socioeconomic system and technology, but would also close the door to these markets [pazari] for a long time, and again we will wake up in a position from where it will be more difficult than where we started”.⁶⁹

This statement uses a rhetoric of defending the socialist system’s international prestige, but the core is a rather mercantilist rationale of defending or opening up new markets for selling industrial products. The previous section has already shown that the opening of future markets was used as an argument by the promoters of the industrial projects in China.

A second argument that was used in the report to support the deal with the PRC was capacity utilization. Again, this argument was used in East Germany in a similar manner, as seen earlier. The authors explicitly mention not only the industry itself, but also construction companies and project planning institutes, that is, organizations which had been built up during the industry construction boom of the first Five-Year Plan. The export of qualified labour would additionally bring hard currency gains, as the report states.⁷⁰

Not all institutions involved were equally enthusiastic about the report’s aims. Most sceptical were the financial authorities. The Ministry of Finance and the central bank did not object to the factory export, but they clearly spoke out against spending additional money for new staff in both ministries and the 10 million leva credit for the heavy industry ministry, which Colov and Zhivkov demanded in order to be prepared for the projects in China and other countries in the future. The financial authorities opined that the necessary restructuring could be undertaken with the existing staff and that the means for producing the concrete equipment should be made available to the specific enterprises by the ministries.⁷¹ This dispute highlights a more general opposition between rather ‘frugal’ financial authorities on the one hand, and foreign trade and industrial ministries with expansive interests on the other.⁷²

Tano Colov and Zhivko Zhivkov, the authors of the corresponding letter, are an interesting duo to have formulated the agenda of not only pursuing the industrial projects in China, but also of restructuring the economic administration for future exports of complex industrial equipment. One might expect such a position from the foreign trade minister. The heavy industry minister, however, presided over many enterprises which were not necessarily interested in getting involved in export, as they were most importantly held to fulfil their plan obligations and additional export obligations could be a hindrance to it. Export obligations were more complicated to fulfil because of more demanding buyers, and the producing enterprises were not rewarded correspondingly, as they only received domestic prices. Based on these reasons, many authors have concluded that socialist enterprises had an ‘export aversion’.⁷³ This may hold true for Soviet enterprises, which had a large domestic market. Enterprises of the machine-building industry in Bulgaria or the GDR, for example, did not have such a large domestic market and thus their heavy industry ministries engaged in securing outlet markets abroad instead of protecting their enterprises from export obligations.

The rationale of defending one’s own export opportunities also came to the fore in bids for projects in China – not least in competition with other socialist states. The situation of competition was exacerbated in 1959/60 by the Chinese economic crisis, or the collapse of the Great Leap Forward campaign. The Chinese leadership responded with a sharp reduction in investment, which entailed a massive reduction of technology imports from Eastern Europe. Bulgarian trade officials at the start even saw advantages in the Chinese policy to curtail foreign trade. As the Chinese side signalled that the time of ordering complete large industrial facilities in the GDR or the Soviet Union had come to an end, a Bulgarian official rejoiced: ‘One has to see that in the last year the Chinese side has oriented towards an increase in building industrial objects of local scope, the capacity of which is smaller, that is, in the limits of our possibilities.’⁷⁴

Conclusion

Economic officials, from industrial ministries, the state plan commission and foreign trade institutions, from both the GDR and Bulgaria, had their say in formulating the concepts which guided Sino-Eastern European industrial cooperation. These economic officials promoted complex industrial exports to China grounded in strategic economic rationales. They did not override the Sino-Soviet split with its geopolitical overtones and they could not dismiss party leaderships when they did not act according to their rationales; instead, it was the other way around.⁷⁵ However, their reasonings had an impact on the outcome: massive industrial projects in China during several years and a delayed realization of the split with China in East Central/Eastern Europe.

The article thus shows that relations with the PRC were not only an expression of socialist friendship or geopolitical competition, but also had an economic background. China was an important market for industrial products and this had an immense repercussion on the development of the economy and economic bureaucracies in East Germany and Bulgaria. Capacity utilization was an important motive, after both states had built or strengthened their industrial base during their first Five-Year Plans. Industrializing their export portfolio was also a motivation per se, but of course returns, in the form of consumption goods that saved hard currency and re-export commodities that earned hard currency, were a necessary economic incentive for these exchanges. Enlarging export opportunities was another important argument for promoting these relations. Selling complete factories and complex industrial equipment to China was meant to broaden economic networks, and to take hold in the Chinese market – even if this endeavour failed after a few years.

The projects in China also served to start or develop facility exports as a sector. They laid the groundwork for gaining further markets (in the Global South) in the future. Therefore, the officials examined here worked on adapting the bureaucratic structures to the requirements of the Chinese market on the one hand, and of the export of complex industrial facilities on the other. Competences for such deals otherwise would have remained scattered over several ministries, committees and enterprises. While the industrialized GDR was able to develop its ability for export of complete industrial facilities further, Bulgaria started from a rather basic stage to become an exporter of industrial facilities. The volumes of exchange differed very much between the industrialized GDR and industrializing Bulgaria. These differences notwithstanding, the China market was, or at least was seen as, a substantial step in these developments by both. The Eastern European countries thus had economic reasons for being hesitant in following the Soviet Union into the split. Although in retrospect the short-lived alliance seems to have been of a very limited relevance, the economic bureaucrats and politicians in the East and East (Central) Europe took it very seriously at the time.

Acknowledgements

The research for and writing of this article was undertaken in the framework of a project on Technology Transfers from Eastern Europe to China funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, realised at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) from 2019 to 2022. I owe thanks to Stefan Troebst, who has made this project possible. For feedback on the manuscript I am very grateful to the participants of the workshop(s) for this special issue in summer and autumn 2021, namely Tao Chen, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Koji Hirata, Austin Jersild, Elisabeth Kaske, Lin Chaochao, Ylber Marku, Péter Vámos and Valeria Zanier. I have to thank Marjory Ruiz for more than one round of copy-editing and proofreading. Bettina Voigt, who worked in the BMBF-project mentioned above, has assisted me in completing the source base for this article by finding and translating a series of Chinese sources. A part of the archival sources for this article already has been collected during a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia in 2016, and I am very grateful to the Centre for having had this opportunity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF); Project FKZ-01UC1903 ‘Die VR China und der sowjetische Hegemonialbereich im Kalten Krieg: Industriekooperation, Technologietransfer und politische Konkurrenz im sozialistischen Lager (1949–1989)’, 2019–2022.

Notes on contributors

Jan Zofka

Jan Zofka is a Historian of Eastern Europe and currently resides as a fellow at the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg of the University of Jena. His recent research focuses on transnational and global dimensions of socialist industrialization processes during the 1950s. He is the author of ‘Chairman Cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s Cotton Trade with African Countries during the Early Cold War (1946–70)’, Journal of Global History, no. 3 (2022); ‘Technokratischer Internationalismus: Kohle-Experten der DDR der 1950er-Jahre in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, no. 2 (2021); ‘China as a Role Model? The “Economic Leap” campaign in Bulgaria (1958–1960)’, Cold War History, no. 3 (2018) and co-editor of Beyond East and South: Spaces of Interaction in the Globalizing Economy of the Cold War (Berlin: Oldenbourg-DeGruyter, 2019) and the special issue ‘Beyond the Kremlin’s Reach? Eastern Europe and China in the Cold War Era’, Cold War History, no. 3 (2018).

Notes

1. “Die VR China – ein Land mit großen Produktions – und Handelsmöglichkeiten,” Bulgarischer Außenhandel no. 2 (1952): 21.

2. Varg, “Myth of the China Market,” 742.

3. Chen, Mao’s China, 49–79; Lüthi, “China and East Europe.”

4. Similar only to Czechoslovakia, see Adamec, “Our Friendship”; Skřivan, “On the Expansion.”

5. See e.g. Jersild, Sino-Soviet Alliance; Kaple, Dream of a Red Factory; Kaple, “Soviet Advisors”; Westad, Brothers in Arms; Bernstein and Li, China Learns; Shen, Sovetskie spetsialisty. For an exception of introductory character, see Zhang, Zhang, and Yao, “Technology Transfer.” For a literature report, see also Chen and Zofka, “Economy of the Sino-Soviet Alliance.”

6. See for example: Babiracki, “Interfacing the Soviet Bloc,” 381; Jersild and Babiracki, Socialist Internationalism; Babiracki and Zimmer, Cold War Crossings; Gorsuch and Koenker, Socialist Sixties; Mark, Marung, and Kalinovsky, Alternative Globalizations, Marung, Müller, and Troebst, “Monolith or Experiment?,” 275–309.

7. For example, by becoming a forklift producer with export capacities, the world’s main cigarette exporter and the host of one of the leading Soviet Bloc computer industries. See Neuburger, Balkan Smoke, Chapter VII; Petrov, “The Rose and the Lotus,” 666–87.

8. Westad, Cold War, 237.

9. Eckstein, China’s Economic Revolution, 253–5.

10. Vámos, “Im Schatten Moskaus,” 173–92. However, the contribution to the exploration of China’s largest oil field in Daqing reveals a substantial significance to Sino-Hungarian cooperation. (Péter Vámos’s contribution in this issue).

11. Statistisches Amt der DDR, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1970, 296–7 and Statistisches Jahrbuch 1959, 574.

12. For numbers for 1960–69 see Statistisches Jahrbuch 1970, 296–7. For numbers 1955–59 see Statistisches Jahrbuch 1959, 574. For numbers for 1953–55, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1956. In 1969, the year of the Sino-Soviet war at the Ussuri river, GDR–PRC trade reached 265 million Valutamark – a sum in the same range as East Germany’s trade with Italy.

13. E.g. see Vámos, “Im Schatten Moskaus,” 174–5.

14. TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 209, Foreign Trade Ministry, Information on Economic Relations with the PRC from 1952 until today, Sofia, August 15, 1957, 22–9; TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 213, Annual Report for 1961, Antonio Angelov, Trade Representation Beijing, Chairman Department Commodity Exchange, 52–65. Chinese delegations were invited to visit Dimitrovgrad by the Bulgarian authorities, see e.g.: “Druzhbata na Kitaiskiia i bălgarskiia narod e nerushima” [Friendship between the Chinese and the Bulgarian people is undestroyable], Rabotnichesko Delo, January 9, 1957, 1

15. TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 209, Report on PRC, Ministry for Trade, Department Business Activity Research, Sofia, August 31, 1957, 1–22, l. 14.

16. E.g. BArch, DY 30/IV 2/6.10.179, 3–6, Note on meeting at bureau of Trade Representative at Embassy in Beijing, Chairman Trade Policy Neubert, October 6, 1957.

17. Letter First Secretary CC SED Walter Ulbricht to Chairman CCP Mao Zedong, Berlin, January 11, 1961, published in Meißner, DDR und China, 271–73 (SAPMO-BArch, ZPA NL 182/1216).

18. According to Frank Dikötter, China’s debt with the GDR had reached “5 to 7 Million” roubles in 1958. Dikötter, Mao’s großer Hunger, 125. While the official statistical yearbook shows a positive trade balance for the GDR starting from 1953, Werner Meißner supposes an East German deficit until 1969. Meißner, DDR und China, 241.

19. TsDA, f. 1244, op. 1, a.e. 4820, 9–14, Report Foreign Trade Minister Zhivko Zhivkov to Chairman Council of Ministers Vălko Chervenkov, on CMEA decisions at Moscow session (June 24–25, 1954), Sofia July 5, 1954. CMEA experts for non-ferrous metallurgy also constantly sought substitutes and methods of increasing production output: TsDA, f. 189, op. 1, a.e. 144, Information Bulletin CMEA Standing Commission for Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, Budapest, August 1958.

20. BArch, DE 1/21359, 43–46, Information Mostertz to Wittkowski on situation in China, January 25, 1957; BArch, DE 1/21359, 47–74, Note Solga, State Plan Commission, to Mostertz, 1st Secretary Department for Economic Policy, GDR Embassy in Beijing, August 1956, incl. enclosure suggestions for economic cooperation between GDR and PRC; BArch, DE 1/12867, 1–12, Report Mostertz, 1st Secretary Department for Economic Policy, GDR Embassy in Beijing, to State Plan Commission, Department International Economic Relations, Beijing, January 3, 1960, 10.

21. BArch, DC 20/15862, Exchange of letters between Grotewohl and Zhou Enlai, 1959.

22. BArch, DE 1/21359, 47–74, Note Solga to Mostertz, August 1956, incl. enclosure; BArch, DC 20/2529, 226–35, Letter Ministry for Heavy Machine-Building, Vice Minister Schomburg, to Vice Prime Minister and Chairman of Commission for Industry Selbmann, Berlin, July 27, 1956, 229; BArch, DL 2/968, 144, Note for Foreign Trade Minister Rau by Chairman Section “SL,” on imports of Borax from PRC, Berlin, September 2, 1958; BArch, DY 30/IV 2/6.10.179, 3–6, Note on Meeting Neubert, Beijing, October 6, 1957.

23. See Bulgarian Trade Statistics, Centralno Statistichesko Upravlenie (CSU), Vănshna tărgoviya (1962), 111; CSU, Vănshna tărgoviya (1989), 270; CSU, Vănshna tărgoviya (editions from 1948, 1949, 1958, 1960). For 1952 to 1954, see TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 209, Information on economic relations with PRC 1952–57, Sofia, August 15, 1957, 22–9, see 23–5.

24. See Zofka, “Chairman Cotton.”

25. TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 213, 52–65, Annual Report for 1961, Antonio Angelov, Trade Representation Beijing, Chairman Department Commodity Exchange, see 54. To measure the significance of this single deal, one may consider that in the early 1960s Bulgaria stood on the brink of bankruptcy because of a hard currency debt of around US$150 million. See Avramov, Pӑri i de/stabilizaciia v Bălgarija, 123–4; Vachkov and Ivanov, Bălgarskiiat vănshen dălg, 116.

26. BArch, DY 30/IV 2/6.10.179, 3–6, Note on Meeting, Neubert, Beijing, October 6, 1957.

27. TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 209, Information on economic relations with PRC from 1952 until today, Foreign Trade Ministry, Sofia, August 15, 1957, 22–9, 26–7.

28. Eckstein, China’s Economic Revolution, 114–15, 150.

29. Dikötter, Maos großer Hunger, 122–6.

30. See Brandt, Ma, and Rawski, “Industrialization in China,” 197–228; Zhang, Zhang, and Yao, “Technology Transfer”; Shen, Sovetskie specialisty; Mamaeva, Verchenko, and Sotnikova, Uchastie SSSR; Westad, Brothers in Arms, Introduction, 1–46.

31. BArch, DL 2/1934, Letter Foreign Trade Ministry, Chairman Department China, Altsohn to Trade Representation in Beijing, Neubert, Berlin, September 2, 1957, 30–31. For the same problem for the CSR traders see Adamec, “Our Friendship,” 179.

32. See e.g. Draft Agreement on Commodity Exchange and Payment Transactions between GDR and PRC for 1950–51, approved by Politburo CC SED, June 6, 1950, published in Meißner, DDR und China, 247–9.

33. BArch, DC 20/2529, 414–27, Letter Minister for Heavy Machinery Erich Apel to Vice Chairman of Council of Ministers Fritz Selbmann, December 3, 1956, including Evaluation of complete industrial facilities delivered from GDR to PRC, 420–1.

34. For the Czechoslovak case: Skřivan, “On the Expansion,” 731.

35. Report on development of foreign trade between GDR and PRC 1951–56, September 1, 1956 [published in Meißner, DDR und VR China, 249–53 (SAPMO-BArch, ZPA NL 182/1217)].

36. BArch, DC 20/2529, Letter Department Export Industrial Complexes to Bureau of Vice Prime Minister Selbmann, April 15, 1957, including an overview of projects with/in China, 366–93.

37. BArch, DC 20/2529, 414–27, Letter Apel to Selbmann, December 3, 1956, see 420.

38. Herrmann, Von Zementfabriken, 11–12.

39. Chen, “Weathering the Storms,” 39–64; Herrmann, Von Zementfabriken; Report Trade between GDR and PRC, published in Meißner, DDR und VR China, 259–61 (SAPMO-BArch, ZPA NL 182/1223).

40. Zofka, “Technokratischer Internationalismus,” 223–7. For coal liquefaction in the NS war economy see: Karlsch and Stokes, “Faktor Öl,” 171–202; Tooze, Ökonomie der Zerstörung, 144–50.

41. Zofka, “Technokratischer Internationalismus,” 199–229. In the early 2000s, the PRC built up a coal liquefaction industry based on the technology of the globally leading South African firm SASOL. Knowledge about the technology of this firm was requested by Chinese officials already in the 1950s’ Scientific-Technical Cooperation with the GDR.

42. “Zementanlagenbau in Dessau – die Geschichte,” Homepage of ZADCON GmbH (one of the successors of VEB Zementanlagenbau), https://www.zadcon.de/de/historisches.html (accessed April 5, 2022).

43. BArch, DL 2–3163, Letter Foreign Trade Ministry/DIA Invest-Export, Enclosed Report Cement Factory in Canada, 151–3.

44. BArch, DL 2–1934, 141–8, Foreign Trade Ministry (Schatz), Overview of the cement plants to be erected by the GDR in the PRC, Beijing, February 6, 1957.

45. LASA, I 420, Nr. 819/1, Report Enterprise History Commission about Foreman Willi Krüger, Dessau, January 30, 1987, 79–86 (84).

46. E.g. BArch, DL-1488, 4, Protocol Meeting April 31, 1954 at China National Technical Import Corporation, Beijing, 2–3.

47. BArch, DL 2–3545, 153–82, Letter Working Group Plan Fulfilment Textile Machine Production, to Vice Minister for Foreign Trade Kerber, Berlin January 4, 1958, 54–7; Organization of Working Field “Export of Complete Facilities.”

48. BArch, DC 20/2529, 414–27, Letter Apel to Selbmann, December 3, 1956, see 423.

49. Ibid.

50. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, a.e. 732, 15–20, Report Director Metalimport Georgi Ivanov Stoev, Director Mashproekt Dimităr Kadiev, and Department Chairman Minproekt Iordan Iankov to Ministers for Heavy Industry Tano Colov and Foreign Trade Zhivko Zhivkov. For a Chinese retrospective see also Sì dǐng qiān xīn kuàng zhì [Siding Chronicle of the Lead and Zinc Mine], Nanning: Guangxi Renmin Chubanshe, 1989 (http://img.chinamaxx.net.0097c15o0900.erf.sbb.spk-berlin.de/). Thanks to Bettina Voigt for exploring and translating the Chinese files.

51. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 12–14, Report brigade for planning mining complex “Sidin,” Chairman Mikhail Petrov Mishev (Minproekt) to Ministers for Heavy Industry and Foreign Trade, January 9, 1957.

52. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 1, Protocol expert session Ministry Heavy Industry on Chinese object “Si-Din,” December 7, 1957.

53. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 7–8, Report Main Engineer Project for Deposit “Si-Din” Michail Petrov Mishev (Minproekt) to Vice Minister for Foreign Trade Ivan Pianechki, November 3, 1957.

54. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 33–9, Report Heavy Industry Minister Tano Colov and Foreign Trade Minister Zhivko Zhivkov to Chairman Council of Ministers Anton Iugov, Sofia, November 22, 1956, 35.

55. Ibid., see 36.

56. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, a.e. 732, l. 26, Report Zhivkov and Colov to Iugov; TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, a.e. 732, l. 15–20, Report Stoev, Kadiev, and Iankov, Beijing, October 4, 1956.

57. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, a.e. 732, l. 59–61, Note Vice Chairman Vӑlko Chervenkov to Chairman Council of Ministers Anton Iugov, November 22, 1956, Sofia.

58. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 65–7, Report Colov and Zhivkov to IIugov, Sofia, November 10, 1956.

59. In 1960 it was split in two parts: DTP Mashinoimpeks and DTP Elektroimpeks. See TsDA, f. 606: “Elektroimpeks,” Istoria na Fondoobrazevatel [History of Fund-generating institution]. For background on the different foreign trade organizations in the machinery and metal sector see also TsDA, f. 348, DTP Rudmetal, Istoricheska Spravka [Historical Guide].

60. For a summary of the debate about the polyvalence of social structures in socialist regimes see Augustine, Red Prometheus, Introduction.

61. Stanoeva, “Balancing,” 162.

62. BArch, DE 1/12867, 1–12, Report Mostertz to State Plan Commission, Beijing, January 3, 1960, 1.

63. BArch, DC 20/2529, 366–93, Letter Department Export Industrial Complexes to Selbmann, April 15, 1957.

64. BArch, DE 1/21359, 75–9, State Plan Commission, Department International Economic Cooperation, Protocol meeting about PRC requests on machine-building for 3rd session of Bilateral Commission for Scientific-Technical Cooperation, September 6, 1956.

65. BArch, DC 20/2529a, 331–54, Exposé on measures for second Five-Year Plan and “Hy Chin,” VEB Kombinat “Otto Grotewohl” “Ingenieurtechnische Zentralstelle (IZ) Böhlen,” Böhlen, January 31, 1956. A similar argument has been made by Łukasz Stanek for the Polish planning institute Miastoprojekt, which had been responsible for building the Polish socialist city of Nowa Huta and then had to look for new markets in other socialist states and the Global South to secure its employment levels. Stanek, Architecture, 183.

66. University Archive Mining Academy Freiberg, IJ 6 C/10, Note on meeting on scientific supervision of coal refinement construction project with China, Freiberg, May 5, 1956.

67. BArch, DC 20–2529, 366–93, Letter Department Export Industrial Complexes to Selbmann, April 15, 1957.

68. BArch, DE 1/21359, 75–9, State Plan Commission, Department International Economic Cooperation, Protocol meeting about PRC requests on machine-building for 3rd session of Bilateral Commission for Scientific-Technical Cooperation, September 6, 1956.

69. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 33–9, Report Colov and Zhivkov to Iugov, Sofia, November 22, 1956, 37.

70. Ibd., 36; see also TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, a.e. 732, 59–61, Note Vice Chairman of Council of Ministers Vălko Chervekov to Chairman.

71. TsDA, f. 414, op. 1, ae. 732, 62–4, Council of Ministers – Information on statements of government agencies on report, Sofia, December 20, 1956;

72. See Avramov, Pări i de/stabilizaciya, 133–6.

73. Kornai, Das Sozialistische System, 394–5; Sanchez-Sibony, “Soviet Industry in the World Spotlight,” 1555–78.

74. TsDA, f. 259, op. 20, a. e. 209, 22–9, Information Foreign Trade Ministry about economic relations with PRC 1952–56, August 15, 1957, 29.

75. For example, Fritz Selbmann was demoted in 1958 as an alleged member of the so-called “Schirdewan group.” Kiechle, Fritz Selbmann, 411–25.