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.

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.

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 European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire.