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

This special issue examines relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and socialist Eastern European states during the Cold War. On the one hand, it might seem obvious to look at these ties and draw comparisons between socialist states of the era; on the other hand, there are heavy asymmetries between the small Eastern European Soviet bloc states and the most highly populated state in the world. Due to its sheer size and geostrategic location, the PRC played an important role in the Cold War. As Liu Xiaoyuan describes it, ‘China was a calculative third force that kept changing partners in pursuance of its own agenda’. ¹ In addition to Communist ideology, a ‘Central Kingdom mentality’ also drove PRC foreign policy. Achievement of ‘modernity’ (with the final aim of achieving communism) and restoration of centrality have been goals of primary importance for China’s political elites throughout the past century. One of the variables in China’s debate and split with the Soviet Union was its endeavour to reassert centrality in a geopolitical sense. In the summer of 1949, Mao Zedong announced that China would ‘lean to one side’: the side of socialism. Mao and his fellow leaders hoped that, after a century of imperialist humiliation, their country could regain its former greatness and a place at the heart of international affairs with the help of Soviet military and economic support. By the mid-1950s, however, the Beijing leadership made it increasingly clear that China was unwilling to be the subordinate member of an alliance led by the USSR. At first, China’s pursuit of an independent position on the world stage manifested itself in ideological debates, but by the mid-1960s became an open power struggle. The nature, methods and outcome of Sino-Soviet debates were determined by the fact that China was not willing to accept the status of a younger brother. As Mao’s aim was to become the leading theoretician of the international communist movement, the PRC targeted not only East Asia, where China had occupied a central role until the 19th century, but also the socialist world in general with the Soviet Union at its helm. For China, assuming the leading role in the socialist camp entailed winning over the European socialist countries, and achieving modernity meant adopting all developments in science and technology, and the economic management system of these allegedly progressive nations.

Socialist Eastern Europe, for its part, had been part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and as such cut off from the mainstream developments of Western Europe. Soviet dominance in the political, economic, and cultural life of Eastern European socialist countries, between 1949–1989, meant that the particular political and economic interests of the ‘satellites’ had to be reconciled with the national interests of the Soviet Union. As a consequence, the socio-economic development of the Eastern European socialist countries was to a large extent determined by the generally accepted hierarchy – with the Soviet Union as the power centre. The Eastern European countries imported Soviet-style institutions and both formal and informal mechanisms of Soviet control existed throughout the whole period of the Cold War.

Due to this general picture of Soviet predominance, historians of post-war Eastern Europe have often considered the Soviet bloc countries’ entanglements with other world regions as marginal.

However, after the collapse of the Soviet system, and with the opening of area studies to global, transnational and transregional history, there has been a clear tendency in the study of intra-bloc relations to consider the Eastern European states not only as satellites in Moscow’s orbit, but also as entities with their own priorities and ambitions. In line with this shift, the guiding questions we raise in this special issue are as follows: to what extent did Chinese and Eastern European players beyond the centres of power have room to manoeuvre outside the agendas of the Kremlin, national governments and party leadership? In other words, to what degree could local political leaders act to represent national interests rather than merely executing Soviet policy, and what domestic and international factors defined where the limits of political foreign relations lay? To what extent did interactions between China and Eastern Europe – from the transfer of economic knowledge and models (Zofka, Vámos), pro-Chinese inner-party factions and their policing by national Party leadership (Gnoinska), the preservation of face-to-face-relationships, such as a friendship cooperative (Kolenovská), and the coining of images of the other and oneself through cultural programmes, trade fairs and in the press (Böröcz, Jersild, Urbansky/Trecker) – happen ‘beyond the Kremlin’s reach?’ The question of the relative autonomy of these political players becomes especially vibrant against the backdrop of the development of Sino–Soviet relations from alliance to split to reconciliation through the Cold War era.

The articles in this special issue take previous findings on government policy and China’s role as a global player in the Cold War game as a starting point to locate the PRC in the socialist world and assess levels of interaction beyond diplomatic and governmental relations. 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. This special issue is based on the contributions to a conference held in Leipzig in July 2015, which was organised through the cooperative efforts of the Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO) Leipzig, the Research Centre for Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and the University of Regensburg. ²

Eastern Europe in itself played a secondary role in Chinese foreign policy. The importance of the Eastern European region stems from the fact that it became part of the Soviet-dominated socialist world after 1948–49. In other words, Chinese foreign policy considered relations with individual states and with the whole region as a derivative of Sino-Soviet relations. Beijing’s policies towards Eastern Europe can be understood only within this context. Nevertheless, as a result of their special relationship with the Soviet Union, China followed a differentiating and differentiated policy towards those countries. States closely cooperating with the USSR were not considered as fully independent by China, therefore Sino-Soviet debates had a direct effect on them as well. Starting in the 1960s, but especially in the 1970s and 1980s, China used those countries as a means to exert pressure on the Soviet Union, whom Beijing viewed as the most important national security threat. Moreover, both Beijing and Moscow used Eastern European satellites as intermediaries between the PRC and the USSR, and, as Vámos demonstrates, Beijing’s interest in the Eastern European experiences of economic reform served China’s need to affirm its socialist identity and legitimise the Party’s new policies. Thus, we argue that small Eastern European states did matter to China’s relations with the socialist camp.

The aim and the questions behind this special issue are part of a broader debate about a socialist world beyond the Soviet bloc and about relations between the socialist camp and the global south. In this debate, contributions to general global economic developments by the socialist camp as well as the creation of specific socialist forms of transnational political and economic interdependence based on peaceful coexistence, cooperation and solidarity are discussed as ‘socialist globalisation’. The recently reawakened research field on East–South relations examines these entanglements from a new angle, going beyond the traditional assumption of bipolarity of Cold War studies. ³ Studies in this field put superpower omnipotence into doubt and explore the room to manoeuvre by players on the ground vis-à-vis Moscow or national party leadership and governments. Accordingly, these studies emphasise heavily Third World agency in these relations and interactions.

In Cold War studies China is often interpreted either as a great power in the US–USSR–PRC geopolitical triangle, or as the leader of the Third World, rather than as part of the socialist world – the angle from which this issue approaches China’s relations with Eastern Europe. ⁴ It is not an easy task to categorise China in an East–South scheme, because of China’s peculiar status between the Second and Third Worlds. China proclaimed itself to be part of the Third World (albeit as leader, with a special Third World definition): its economy in large parts was still based on agriculture and in the past it had been subjected to imperial policies of great powers. On the other hand, China was part of the socialist camp, it had an observer status in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) until 1961, and in general was considered a state far too powerful to belong to the Third World. We argue that, regardless of whether China should be classified as a developed or developing country at this point in time, the PRC must be part of the debate about socialist globalisation. The industrialisation drive of the 1950s substantially supported by the Soviet Union and other COMECON states served as the basis for China’s later rise – and it still shapes Chinese economic geography and thus the world as we know it today.

With the benefit of global and transnational historical perspectives, not only are East–South relations interpreted anew, but so also are East–East relations. Interest in ‘socialist internationalism’ within the socialist camp has grown significantly in recent years. ⁵ Instead of COMECON being perceived merely as a hollow hull, these studies highlight the systems of economic interaction and scientific-technical cooperation which caused people, ideas, technological knowledge and blueprints for machines and industrial facilities to cross borders. During the honeymoon period of COMECON, the PRC was part of these networks, signed treaties for scientific and technological cooperation with all Eastern European socialist states, and in this framework exchanged students, trainees, blueprints for technologies, and received engineers for politico-technical advisory bodies. The Soviet Union and its satellites greatly supported the industrialisation process. Industrial cooperation was important not only for China, but also for the Soviet bloc countries, which tried to use international trade with China as a basis for an export restructuring to develop complex industrial facilities. Even for the Soviet Union, the PRC became the most important trading partner and retained this position throughout the 1950s, as is pointed out in Zofka’s contribution to this special issue. Very few studies focus on this aspect of Chinese participation and integration in the transnational web of the socialist camp. Among the exceptions are Shen Zhihua who has traced the presence of Soviet experts in the PRC, and Austin Jersild, who in his book on the Sino-Soviet alliance describes postcolonial attitudes of Soviet leaders and reservations of technical experts as the cultural basis of the split, in contrast to earlier studies where these events were seen as a mere leadership quarrel. ⁶

Building on these debates and perspectives, this special issue examines entanglements, connections and interactions in the socialist camp by focusing on the contributions of players on the ground outside of main leadership circles and official diplomatic relations. Undoubtedly, we recognise the immense significance of hierarchies, government decisions, and the influence that Moscow had on the actions, decisions and rationales of these players. Nonetheless, we identify them as protagonists with their own rationales, decisions and – even if to a limited extent – autonomous action. This approach also reflects a recent shift towards using hitherto neglected document repositories in researching postwar Chinese history. ⁷

Some of the contributions focus on cultural representations of China in Eastern Europe (and vice versa) and discuss what part these images played in the Sino-Soviet split. József Böröcz follows the Performing Arts Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army on a tour in the fateful year of 1956. Böröcz demonstrates clearly how the programme of the Ensemble’s performances took on a national character, and how it played on the ‘imagined, highly valued, deep cultural tie between the Chinese and Hungarian societies and cultures’ and ‘skipped’ the Soviet Union that lies between, both geographically and in geopolitical terms. The determination of these protagonists, acting inside various hierarchical systems, is an astonishing example of the room to manoeuvre of individuals within these countries. ‘High culture’ and socialist attitudes towards it are also the crucial keyword in Austin Jersild’s contribution on socialist trade fairs as a site of negotiation for power relations between the USSR and the PRC. With the Soviets looking west and failing to understand the need to revise their image of China as a disciple to be lectured, Jersild discovers the cultural fundament of the Sino-Soviet split. Sören Urbansky and Max Trecker study how the deterioration of reciprocal relations is mirrored in the main party newspapers of East Germany, Hungary and Poland and how the portrayal of China differed, at times significantly, in Moscow, Budapest, East Berlin and Warsaw. Their findings suggest that the uncertainty of future relations between China and the Soviet Union, combined with disagreements between Moscow and its satellites from 1956 onwards, forced leaderships in Eastern Europe to adapt to the new circumstances, while at the same time offering leeway for their own political agendas.

Other contributors study the nature and implications of transfers of ideas and knowledge between the PRC and Eastern European states, and the impact these exchanges had on the countries themselves. Péter Vámos examines the exchange of knowledge during the rapprochement in the 1980s in the context of reform policies in Eastern Europe and in China. The much more powerful Chinese state’s economic planning bureaucracy was interested to ‘learn’ methods of reforming a centralised state economy from Hungarian economists, whom they considered to be more experienced in this area. Jan Zofka’s contribution looks at a transfer in the other direction. The Bulgarian leadership in the late 1950s was highly fascinated by the Chinese Great Leap Forward campaign and proclaimed their own campaign for speeding up plan fulfilment, sending delegations to China to study the mobilisation of unpaid labour for big dam constructions and the structure of people’s communes. Rather than being a geopolitical step of confrontation or bargaining with Moscow, Zofka interprets the interest in regulation methods and agricultural techniques as being enabled by the transnational web of the socialist world with repercussions on the daily life of Bulgarian villagers. These repercussions also are at the centre of Daniela Kolenovska’s study on the ‘friendship’ between a Czechoslovak agricultural cooperative and its Chinese counterpart. Kolenovska shows how contacts during the 1950s influenced relations during the last decade of the Cold War and beyond. Margaret Gnoinska brings into focus the Polish intra-party opposition against Władysław Gomułka, which culminated in the forced resettlement to Albania of Kazimierz Mijal, the face of the ‘pro-Chinese’ Communist Party of Poland, and places it in the context of Mao’s differentiation policy and the Sino-Soviet split. The cracks in the monolithic nature of the Soviet bloc become clearly visible through a closer examination of the lives and careers of individuals like Mijal, whose activities went beyond the control of the Kremlin.

Leaving the image of a Moscow-controlled monolith behind, the room to manoeuvre for players in socialist states beyond the centres of power has to be measured anew. This special issue aims to contribute to this task by providing new insights into the rationales behind foreign and economic policy behaviour of both China and Eastern Europe. From the PRC’s perspective, the study of the experience of former European socialist countries is of vital importance even today. The lessons that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has learned from the collapse of Soviet bloc party-states contributed significantly to its survival as the reigning party. After the collapse of communist ruling parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the CCP undertook systematic assessments of the causes of their failure to avoid a similar fate. The CCP not only reacted to the events in the USSR and Eastern European party-states, but it was also proactive in instituting reforms within itself and within China to strengthen the party’s ruling capacity and remain in power as a one-party state. This, in turn, seems to have allowed the PRC to create a favourable international environment where Beijing is in the position to shape the rules. From the European perspective, the study of the history of relations with the PRC can also provide useful lessons for conducting relations with the China of today and tomorrow. With China now a global power that articulates its ambitions much more explicitly than in the Cold War era, the importance of maintaining relations with China is not be underestimated for the countries of Europe. After all, it was not until the 1995–2005 period that the EU and China really began to fashion their own relationship, free of the shadows of Cold War dynamics. Therefore it is in the greatest interests of the new EU member states from Eastern Europe to maintain ‘correct handling’ of their relations with China, if they are to build and maintain a place of influence on the global political stage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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).