Authors

Jan Adamec¹;  ¹ Independent Scholar, Czechia

Discussion

The Sino-Czechoslovak relations underwent several ups and downs in 1949-1989. The initial political alliance was cemented by intensive trade and economic cooperation in 1949–1959. The Czechoslovak leadership then followed the Soviet line in the Sino-Soviet split in 1960–1964. The mutual Sino-Czechoslovak relations then deteriorated rapidly in the late 1960s mainly due to the PRC´s open criticism of the Warsaw Pact intervention against Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The relations were normalized, based primarily on trade cooperation, only at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. In 1952, when mutual relations were still at their best, the two countries concluded an agreement on scientific and technical co-operation. Every year, both agreed on a protocol in which each party included its requirements on what enterprise it would aim to visit or which scientific issue it would like to consult. One of the Czechoslovakia´s objective was, for example, "... to involve scientific and technical cooperation in the service of the development of foreign trade relations and to provide Czechoslovak foreign trade with the opportunity to use scientific and technical cooperation to promote export interests towards the PRC." Other tasks of the "scientific and technical cooperation", especially in the 1980s, were to acquire "... technical and scientific knowledge, especially in areas built in the PRC with the help of advanced capitalist states," and also to gather information on "... current political and social realities in China." The aim of the paper is to focus on the assignments the individual scientists went to the PRC with, how they were able to accomplish their mission and how they reported on what they saw and whom they met and spoke to. Their final reports provide an interesting source from which we can assess to what extent there was a genuine interest in accessing new technological or scientific knowledge or establishing contacts, and to what extent the scientists and engineers served as surrogates for professional politicians, diplomats or intelligence officers. The paper draws primarily on the archival evidence from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic´s Archive and other insitutions involved (governmental ministries, scientific institutions, party committees).