BOOK REVIEWS

Claudie Gardet, Les relations de la République populaire de Chine et de la République démocratique allemande (1949-1989)

Claudie Gardet's book is the first study in French of the history of the relations between the German Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of China. It provides us with an addition to Werner Meissner's study of the same topic, Die DDR und China 1949 bis 1990. Politik-Wirtschaft-Kultur. Eine Quellensammlung, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1995. Meissner's collection of documents with accompanying commentaries opened up this field of research. Claudie Gardet, for her part, has chosen a narrative approach which expands into a vast chronicle of Sino-East German relations. The two authors have clearly had problems in obtaining source material, since only the archives of the former GDR are as yet only partly accessible. While conceding that the use of Chinese archival material would have introduced another perspective, Meissner drew on an impressive body of Chinese published documents. By excluding this from her own source material, Claudie Gardet has chosen, in spite of the title of her book, to put the stress on East German politics, and to background the Chinese initiatives and reactions, which are seen entirely from an East German angle. It is also a pity that she chose not to rework and refine the original text of her university thesis, and to confine her study to a purely descriptive approach.

The author distinguishes four ten-year periods in the history of bilateral relations from 1949, when both states were founded, until 1989 which saw the end of the GDR. The division into distinct decades does not always seem appropriate, and nor does the line drawn between inter-Party and inter-state relations. This way of presenting the history of bilateral relations forces the author to make several loops back in time, which disrupts the continuity for the reader. The 1950s are defined as the period of “fraternal union”, when the political systems of both countries displayed a number of similarities (the single party, centralised administration, planned economy etc.), which, following the Soviet pattern, aimed at “the building of socialism”. Although the declared aims were the same, the initial political and structural conditions were markedly different because, having been set up by the USSR, the survival of the GDR depended upon the presence of Soviet troops. Yet, even though good relations with the Soviet Union were vital for the East German leaders, they tried on several occasions to follow an independent policy with regard to the PRC. Both countries devoted the first years of their existence to stabilising the position of their respective regimes, and from 1954 onwards their bilateral relations strengthened. The following year, after the visit by Zhou Enlai to the GDR, the two countries signed a treaty of friendship and co-operation. For some time Sino-East German relations developed outside the single framework set up by the USSR. For example, after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, fearing a de-Stalinisation movement in their own country, the East German leaders sought to build an alliance with their Chinese counterparts, and opted for the same kind of repression of any attempt at political liberalisation. Similarly, the GDR leaders took a favourable view, at least until 1960, of the Chinese experiment with the people's communes, which they presented as a model for the peoples of Asia, whereas Moscow was already labelling them as “reactionary”. In fact, at that time the GDR was undertaking its own forced collectivisation. But strong pressure from Moscow after the summer of 1960 dampened the strength of the “East Berlin—Peking axis” (Meissner) and forced the East German Communist Party (the SED) to distance itself from its support for the Great Leap Forward, and to rally behind the Moscow line within the approaching Sino-Soviet confrontation. The antagonism between Peking and Moscow, which affected such issues as the border conflicts between China and India in 1959 and 1962, the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and relations with Western states, put the “East Berlin—Peking axis” under severe strain. But, despite a distinct chill in bilateral relations, China unreservedly supported the GDR's decision in August 1961 to build the Berlin wall. The definitive official break occurred after January 1963, following the Sixth Congress of the SED, when the East German communists finally took sides and engaged in a harsh condemnation of the Albanian party. This duly provoked Chinese criticism of the Yugoslav communists and the policies of Nehru. 1963 thus marked a definitive deterioration and the beginning of a long freeze in bilateral relations. For fifteen years there was a total break, despite an admittedly fleeting period of detente following the fall of Khrushchev in 1964. With the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Brezhnev compelled his communist allies to hold annual conferences on the “Chinese question” (interkit), which were aimed at imposing a common line to be followed towards China. In fact, these “anti-Chinese united front” conferences, organised under Soviet control, did not always proceed in perfect harmony, and sometimes revealed internal tensions in the communist camp. The author spends too little time on the disagreements which broke out from 1980 onwards, when the SED wished (in vain, it seems) to put a brake on the excessive criticism of China. The East German Communist Party leaders had been wanting for some time to tone down the ideological attacks on Peking, whose leaders since the late 1960s had been concentrating on altering their foreign policy. One of the consequences of this, and by no means the least important, was to be the establishment of diplomatic relations with most Western countries, including West Germany, in 1972. East Berlin witnessed these developments with anxiety, especially as Peking supported Bonn's policy, which called for the reunification of Germany. The PRC only paid a rather secondary kind of political and economic attention to its East German counterpart, which the Chinese press had even started to call Dongde (East Germany). It was not until after the death of Mao Zedong and the 1980s that there was a progressive upswing in bilateral contact. In 1986 the GDR was the first Warsaw Pact country to open the way to a rapprochement with China, when Erich Honecker, leader of the State Council, and General Secretary of the Party, paid an official visit to Peking, which led to a return visit by Zhao Ziyang in the following year. The “East Berlin—Peking axis” was reactivated for the last time in 1989 when, on the eve of the collapse of the GDR, the two countries showed their disapproval of Gorbachev's liberalisation policy. Peking managed to put a stop to China's internal political crisis by military means whereas, in order to do the same thing, East Berlin would have had to call on the Soviet troops stationed in the country, but these had been ordered not to intervene, thus causing the precipitous collapse of the East German regime.

On the whole, the history of the relations between the GDR and the PRC shows the narrow room for manoeuvre at the disposal of the GDR, both towards Moscow, which, from 1949 had imposed its own ideological and strategic options, and towards Peking, which, since the late 1970s, attached greater importance to its economic relations with West Germany.

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall