Britain, France, West Germany and the People's Republic of China, 1969–1982

The European Dimension of China's Great Transition

Martin Albers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137565662
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137565679
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book focuses on helping readers to fill the gap of the little known history between Western Europe and its most important trading partner: the People's Republic of China. Inspired by the economic and political signifance of Sino-European relations, this book shows how the China policies of the three biggest states of Western Europe – Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany – helped China reintegrate into the international community in the 1970s. Against the background of the Cold War, the end of Maoism, and the emergence of globalization, the governments in Bonn, Paris and London had to find ways of dealing with Europe's declining influence and promote their own national interests in Asia.

Based on newly declassified government files, readers will find such sources invaluable in understanding the argument that, despite pursuing very different policies, the three governments supported a rapid expansion of peaceful exchange between the People's Republic and Europe and substantially contributed to the success of Beijing's reform policy.

© The Author(s) 2016

Martin AlbersBritain, France, West Germany and the People's Republic of China, 1969–1982Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56567-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Martin Albers¹

(1)

Administration of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

End Abstract

My wife was born in the nineteenth century. Or at least the living conditions in which she grew up resembled in many ways those one finds in accounts from the time before the advent of mass consumer society in Europe, the USA and other developed countries. Her family would grow vegetables and keep chickens in the backyard not as a sign of postmodernist, degrowth lifestyle but as an essential compliment to their normal diet. Eating meat was a luxury. There was only one room in the house she shared with her parents, and everybody in the neighbourhood had to use communal showers to wash. Transport was basically still dependent on muscular force and a bicycle was a highly valued piece of household equipment. This was the early 1990s in a small provincial town in Shandong province.

Yet change had started to set in, even in a corner that seemed centuries away from the already bustling megacities of Shanghai and Shenzhen. When she was six years old, the combustion engine entered her family’s life as her father bought his first motorcycle, much admired by relatives and neighbours alike. By the time the family bought its first car a few years later, their living standards had essentially reached Western levels with a three-bedroom flat, and all electric household appliances from freezer to TV—including the obligatory rice cooker. Less then ten years later, the young Chinese student from a country town travelled to Europe for the first time, to begin her studies at Cologne University. Though her grades were good, the main reason for her being able to study alongside peers who had grown up under entirely different conditions was not so much a particular talent, gift or extraordinary hard work. Rather, it reflected in one individual story the effects of three decades of breakneck economic growth and increasing international connections at nearly all social levels.

In other words, in less than 20 years she had experienced a social progression that took several generations, about a century earlier, in Europe and the USA. This story of China’s radical transition and opening has been told many times.¹ Yet it remains one of the most unlikely and incredible processes of the recent past, essential for making sense of today’s world and for grasping the future scenarios that seem possible.

Understanding it takes us back to a wholly different story, to 3 November 1839. On that day three British ships attacked a Chinese fleet off the coast of Kowloon and fired the first shots of the conflict known as the First Opium War.² This conflict forced China to confront the West and worked as a catalyst for the long political and economic decline of the Middle Kingdom that was only stopped in 1949 or perhaps even in 1976. In between lay a period when China was unable or unwilling to show serious initiative in the international system.³ It was only in the 1970s that a unified and independent China chose to appear on the stage of world politics to peacefully interact with the Western world on equal terms.

As it had from the 1840s–1860s, China began opening up again to Western influences. And if the West’s economic and political interaction with China in the nineteenth century had taken place in the context of the ‘first globalisation’, the transformation of the largest nation on earth into the workshop of the world a long century later became one of the icons of the ‘second globalisation’.⁴ The circumstances of China’s second opening to the West, however, were fundamentally different from the first. In the period after 1969 it was the leadership of the People’s Republic that largely decided the terms on which it would deal with the outside world. Though still economically poor, the country could freely determine the speed and scope of the process of reintegration into an increasingly interdependent world.

It is the aim of this book to study certain international aspects of this process, the consequences of which we feel every day when we go shopping, switch on the news or look at the stock market. Put differently, I try to show how we got from diplomatic decisions of war and peace to students from Shandong province studying sociology in Cologne. More specifically, I look at one chapter of this story that has, surprisingly, been left almost blank until today—the role of Western Europe in facilitating China’s great transition.

When dealing with the period in focus, 1969–82, it is impossible not to have in mind a better known story, which is the relations between China and the two superpowers, notably the USA.⁵ But my main concern is to go beyond this triangle and see China through the eyes of three Western European countries: France, Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). All three had a long tradition of interacting with China and they all shared with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the fate of territories under direct threat of conventional as well as nuclear warfare.

Similarly, London, Paris and Bonn were all implicated in the Helsinki process and the general developments of détente that seemed to loosen the bloc structures and give the medium powers more room for manoeuvre.⁶ Though their approaches to European integration were different and changed over the course of the period studied, Bonn, Paris and London were also key players in the European Community (EC), which was of critical importance to the Chinese leadership in its search for ways to balance Soviet power. Finally, France, Britain, and the FRG were still dwarfing China’s gross domestic product (GDP) and were among the first to expand their commercial relations with the PRC after the end of the Cultural Revolution’s most radical phase in 1969. Even more importantly, the three countries shared the bulk of Sino-European trade, as they do today. This has become one of the key factors in the global economy, with China being the EU’s second largest trading partner and the EU even taking first place among the PRC’s suppliers and customers.⁷ There are therefore many reasons why the European perspective on developments in China is crucial, and why analysing the three countries’ bilateral relations with the PRC seems relevant. Yet, despite their evident importance for today’s world, surprisingly little has been written about how current Sino-European relations came about, especially if compared to the libraries filled with studies on the ups and downs of ties between Washington and Beijing.⁸

Earlier periods of Sino-European relations have been studied to some extent, and over the past decades a few scholars have begun to look at bilateral relations between Britain, France and Germany on the one hand and China on the other, often from the perspective of political science.⁹ But with very few exceptions, no historical research has been undertaken to analyse Sino-European relations in a wider context during the 1970s and 1980s, the crucial period when the foundations for China’s economic and political rise were laid.¹⁰

Overall, this neglect of the relations between Western Europe and China in the 1970s is related to the fact that China policy often took a less prominent place in public debates than other international issues. But it is the purpose of this book, firstly, to challenge the notion that China only played a marginal role in British, French and German policies during these years; and, secondly, to look at the origins of China’s rise as a global power during the decade in question.

The aim of this book is threefold. In the following chapters I will first of all look for the main factors guiding European China policies and, secondly, discuss the impact these policies arguably had on the PRC and the international scene, asking, finally, how far this helps us to understand interactions between Western democracies and authoritarian states on a more general level.

Though periodisations in history can always be challenged, the years 1969–82 seem appropriate for studying a number of major transitions. In 1969 the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution ended in China and the country started taking a new interest in developing relations with the outside world.¹¹ Thirteen years later, in September 1982, the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) marked the full integration of Deng Xiaoping’s reform programme into the ideological canon.¹² Between these important dates lay the political opening towards the West under Mao, followed by the economic opening under Deng. In other words, the years between 1969 and 1982 laid the foundation for current economic and political ties between Europe and China.¹³

As mentioned above, this is a self-consciously Eurocentric study, adopting the perspective of three Western countries. The main reason for such an approach is that public records in China are not nearly as accessible as in Europe. This not only means the effective impossibility of analysing the two sides of bilateral relations to the same degree. It has also led to the absence of a comparative body of secondary literature to place the PRC’s international relations in a wider context. There are some recent studies of Beijing’s foreign policy. Interestingly, however, they mostly leave out the foreign policy of the 1970s and early 1980s, dealing either with foreign strategy under Mao or with the time after 1978 when the reforms had started.¹⁴ The time span between 1972 and 1978 is largely neglected even though many key figures (most notably Deng Xiaoping) were continuously active.¹⁵ Most books on Chinese foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution end well before the late 1970s, and understandably concentrate on the radical phase between 1966 and 1969 and on the rapprochement with Washington.¹⁶ China’s early UN policy, its implication in Third World conflicts and its perception of European détente therefore do not receive much attention. Chen Jian is a rare exception in this regard. He makes a compelling case for the links between Mao’s domestic programmes and China’s role in the Cold War.¹⁷ Chen’s work provides an excellent guide to the PRC’s foreign policy in general, and is therefore highly important for my research. Many of Chen’s findings on Beijing’s relations with the two superpowers are also directly relevant to Sino-European relations.

In other words, there exist a number of publications that somehow touch upon the topic that this book is covering. But hardly any original research has been done to address some of the key questions regarding European China policy. It is therefore clear that the existing literature leaves a gap to be filled. Given the importance of Europe’s current relations with the PRC, we simply do not know enough about how governments in Bonn, Paris and London set about developing these in their crucial early period after 1969.

Dimensions of Sino-European Exchange

In order to study this period, one main challenge lies in positioning this book’s approach with regard to recent developments in international and comparative history. While classical diplomatic history remains very much alive, the field has been greatly enriched by a number of innovative approaches. These include the focus on cultural phenomena, the rise of transnational history and the transition from world history to global history.¹⁸ At the same time it cannot be denied that in terms of their heuristic motives and their objects of study, transnational history, global history and diplomatic history have much in common.¹⁹ They all concentrate on modern history with a focus on the very recent past, and they all acknowledge the importance of developments that involve exchange across borders.²⁰ Most studies of the mentioned fields also attribute a pivotal role to the state as the most powerful form of human organisation in the recent past.²¹ Put differently, the study of foreign policy has been transformed over recent decades but it still seems highly relevant even for many proponents of transnational and global history.

Following these assumptions I mainly concentrate on the national governments of the three European states studied, putting the following study in the realm of classical international history. Yet it is an international history very much aware of the developments in the field. The traditional concentration of diplomatic historians on issues of military strategy and defence obviously plays a role because the framework of the Cold War, with its ideological and strategic imperatives, bound all Western European countries. But since Sino-European relations rarely directly touched on vital issues of security on either side, my interest goes much further than the question of war and peace.

At the time of writing, China’s power and influence on Europe are not only felt in terms of military might or diplomatic leverage. China’s continuously rising defence budgets certainly contribute to its increasing weight in global affairs.²² But equally, if not more salient, is its importance as a global consumer of Western goods, as a large-scale producer of everything from toys to real-estate bubbles, and as the biggest creditor the world has ever seen. And China’s rise is also about perceptions of the country as a potential threat to many things the West claims to cherish, from intellectual property, secure jobs and human rights to the vision of sustainable development in Africa and Latin America.²³ Finally, China’s post-1976 development is increasingly affecting Western and global culture, be it in sports, movies, or through the hundreds of thousands of students it exports.²⁴ If one attempts to go back to the origins of China’s rise and the Western European role therein, it therefore seems futile to concentrate solely on matters of professional diplomacy and summit-level politics. What is needed instead is a multi-dimensional analysis of Sino-European encounters. That means combining diplomatic history with approaches from other subdisciplines such as transnational and global history.

To meet this challenge from an economic perspective, this book seeks to uncover the state’s role in the development of transnational economic exchange between Europe and the PRC. In so doing, it points up a clear overlap with the research interests of many transnational historians as well as researchers working on the origins of the globalisation we currently experience.²⁵ While being aware of the pitfalls when using theoretical approaches from other disciplines, I also take some inspiration from recent concepts of political economy. The relatively open and empirical approaches by Peter Hall and David Soskice are particularly useful for my work. Though in my case it does not seem appropriate to apply all of their models and theories, they provide a comparative analytical framework to study the interactions between the state and private actors in market societies, highlighting how different sets of institutions influence economic outcomes as well as politics in capitalist societies.²⁶

With these arguments in mind, it is important to understand how Western European governments sought to facilitate market entry into China for their national industries. This issue plays an important role, for example, in Chaps. 4 and 6, where the role of economic associations is discussed, using sources from these organisations where available. Here I argue that while governments tried to influence such associations and their China policies in various ways, they all had to face business and organisational structures that had deeper roots in the respective political economy and could therefore not be altered at will. The making of economic exchange thus depended on government leaders as well as on opposition politicians and business representatives, who had direct contacts with China, making this a truly transnational field of study.

In addition to the economic perspective, cultural diplomacy and issues of perception play an important role in this study. Perhaps surprisingly, this does not concern Western Maoism, which had next to no impact on actual Sino-European relations.²⁷

But there was a crucial cultural dimension of classical interstate contacts with important political and economic implications for this book’s topic. Unlike in the nineteenth century, European countries could not force their way into China by means of military intervention. Instead they had to seek cooperation with the PRC on an equal footing if they wanted to improve bilateral relations. Areas where such cooperation seemed most promising were science and education, in other words classical fields of cultural transfer and cultural diplomacy.²⁸ This was closely linked to the expectation of political decisionmakers that cultural exchange with the PRC would influence the way the Chinese elite thought and acted with regard to Europe. Though there is not enough room for a detailed examination of these expectations and what they say about Western identities, cultural transfers figure prominently in this study. These too were often connected to government policies but not totally dependent on them. In many instances private actors were important agents of cultural and economic transfer, and these private contacts created both opportunities and challenges for the respective governments. Individuals like Joseph Needham from Britain or the German Otto Wolff von Amerongen, for example, had a very high reputation in the PRC long before their countries sent ambassadors to China. The economic and cultural associations they were active in thus marked a dimension of transnational exchange in their own right, as well as a factor to be dealt with by professional diplomats from London and Bonn.

Finally, the global context of European China policy plays a crucial role for this study. This obviously concerns the framework of the Cold War in Europe and Asia, but it goes much further than that. European integration, the end of the Bretton Woods system, the oil crises, and the increasing challenges to Keynesian interventionism in the West were all factors that affected China policies, at least indirectly. The French attempts to sell nuclear technology to the PRC, for example, can only be understood against the background of national and international debates on energy policy. Likewise, the dream of German businessmen to help build China’s heavy industries in exchange for non-ferrous metals reflected their perceptions of ongoing changes in the global economy. To really understand how European governments dealt with China one therefore has to take cultural and economic factors into account and see China policy in the context of both the Cold War and accelerating globalisation.

Pursuing this kind of international history requires adopting a relatively wide definition of China policies as the main object of study. Not all of the fields and topics mentioned can be researched to the same degree in a single monograph. Instead I have chosen a pragmatic approach that concentrates on national governments while also trying to take cultural and economic factors into account wherever they seem relevant. This leads to the definition of ‘China policy’ as the sum of strategies and actions by representatives of the state that aim to influence political, economic or cultural relations between the respective country and China, or to use these relations for other political ends. Consequently, the main actors in the book are professional politicians and diplomats. But businessmen, scientists and cultural representatives also played active roles in China policy. It was thus that the incarceration of a British journalist by the Chinese, the transfer of technical norms from Germany to the PRC, and even the gift of panda bears to European visitors had an impact on intergovernmental relations as well as on perceptions and wider societal exchange between China and Europe.

Comparing Britain, France and West Germany

Transnational and comparative history are closely related conceptually.²⁹ At the same time it is striking that comparative history in the field of international affairs is not yet very developed when it comes to relations between Asia and the West. One reason for this is certainly that studies of international or global history involve, by definition, two or more countries with all the complexity and challenges regarding ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Historical Background to Sino-European Rapprochement in the 1970s
• 3. Western Europe and Détente in East Asia, 1969–72
• 4. Promotion of European Exports to China and the Role of Economic Diplomacy, 1969–72
• 5. The Diplomacy of High-Level Visits During the Twilight of Maoism, 1973–77
• 6. Widening and Deepening the Relationship with China Before the Reforms, 1973–77
• 7. The ‘Alliance Era’ and Strategic Cooperation with China, 1978–82
• 8. Promoting Transnational Exchange with China in the Age of Reform, 1978–82
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter