Authors
Nikolay Erofeev 1 University of Oxford, UK Discussion
During the Cold War, large-scale urban development projects were launched in Mongolia with technical assistance from various socialist countries – China, East Germany, Poland and, above all, the Soviet Union. This paper shows that in order to deliver construction projects, Mongolian actors had to negotiate assistance not with just one, but multiple countries, each providing various forms of aid. In contrast to the tendency in recent scholarship to analyze international assistance on a bilateral basis, as cases of interactions between two countries, this article takes the standpoint of multilateralism to reveal complex entanglement of multiple countries. From this viewpoint, this article shows that the assistance of various donors was asymmetrical, as it was led by varying motivations and available resources in providing the funds, expertise, equipment, and labor required. While literature often presents Soviet-Chinese involvement in the Third World as a competition between two models of development, the story of their involvement in Mongolia is different – that of a complimentary and collaborative, rather than competitive assistance. 
