Economic Alliance Economic Split

<p>This book delivers crucial historical background in these times as bloc-building returns to the global economy and China and Russia massively intensify their economic cooperation. It gathers global cutting-edge research on the economic exchanges in the early years of the Cold War between the newly formed People’s Republic of China and Soviet Eastern Europe.</p><p>Based on multidimensional archival sources from China Eastern Europe and beyond this book departs from the traditional Cold War accounts of superpowers and geopolitics and looks into economic practices: how Chinese officials tried to access foreign markets via the Leipzig trade fair how the Soviet-modelled car industry had to be built with US-trained Chinese engineers or how socialist bureaucrats rationalized the giant projects of factory-building in China with developing future markets for industrial products on a global scale. Such a perspective helps to understand how economic rationales and second-tier actors contributed to the forming of the short-lived but far-reaching alliance and how cooperation on the ground for a while was able to survive while generally mutual disappointment about the quick exhaustion of the cooperation’s benefits benefitted the swift split. These insights also provide a basis for rethinking the relationship between politics and economy in socialist regime-building during the Cold War.</p><p>This book will appeal to scholars and students of Cold War history international relations and economic history. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issue of <em>European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire</em>.</p>