The Dilemma of Socialist Solidarity: East German Specialists in Mao's China, 1952–64

Abstract

During the 1950s and early 1960s, a large number of specialists from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were sent by their government to China to assist in the latter's socialist construction, in which the GDR government had significant room to manoeuvre. These experts helped improve the GDR's economic relations with China yet during their tenure in China, they enjoyed preferential treatment from the Chinese government, and their living conditions were much better than those of the average Chinese people around them, which triggered resentment and violence from ordinary Chinese people. Meanwhile, East Germans were deeply concerned about Chinese technological catch-up via imitation and reproduction. The hierarchical system of socialist economic and technological cooperation and the legacy of technology transfer between Germany and China since the late nineteenth century were two main reasons for this predicament in bilateral relations, which undermined their cooperation even before the bilateral split became widely known.