This dissertation employs a combination of diplomatic and intelligence history to challenge established narratives about the relations between Nationalist China and the Third Reich during WWII. This approach allows for the exploration of how Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime diplomacy influenced Chinese foreign policy in regards to the Axis Powers. Archival documents reveal that in the fight for China’s survival pragmatism, rather than ideology, was the most important force behind Chiang Kai-shek’s foreign policy strategy. As earlier research has shown, Republican Chinese foreign policy had many pragmatic traits, and in this project it becomes evident that diplomatic communication was maintained by Chiang Kai-shek with as many countries as possible. This foreign policy approach was influenced by the experience of having unreliable allies throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This approach resulted in the maintenance of communication with Germany, even beyond the crucial official break in diplomatic relations between the two countries in July 1941. This project explores how clandestine back channels emerged as the preferred tool for fostering Sino-German relations, and how these back channels continued from 1942 until 1945 in Switzerland. Special envoys with intelligence links, appointed by Chiang Kai-shek, conversed with representatives of the German party intelligence service, the RSHA, and with the German Resistance movement of 20 July 1944. These back channels reflected Chiang Kai-shek’s pragmatic foreign policy, and these connections subsequently contributed to the difficulties that arose between the Western Allies and China at the end of the war.

As Deng Xiaoping assumed China’s paramount leadership position in 1978, he first and foremost sought to bring China out of a period of economic decline and international isolation defined by the Cultural Revolution. Having already established first contacts with the US and Western European states in the early 1970s, Beijing under Deng swung open its doors further to the rest of the world in order to source foreign investment as well as technology transfers. While most existing literature has been focused on how Deng’s rise was received in the US, Western Europe and Asia, almost no literature exists on how this change was perceived in Eastern Europe. This study aims to address this lacuna by examining how the Soviet Union’s once ‘most-loyal’ client state and its bastion on the front lines of the Cold War, the GDR, increasingly defied a Moscow-imposed anti-China policy to engage China for economic and political gain during the 1980s. Chapter one will begin with a general overview of GDR-China relations before the period of analysis. It will highlight that East Germany first enjoyed amicable relations with China, only to be reined in during the Sino-Soviet Split by Moscow to conform to a general antiChina line. It will argue that as Deng rose to power in Beijing and repeated frictions beset Soviet-GDR relations, East Berlin gradually sought an independent foreign policy towards China in order to take advantage of China’s opening to the world. Chapter Two examines bilateral relations in the early 1980s. It argues that the GDR was at first motivated by potential trade ties with Beijing in order to bolster its sagging economy. Chapter Three reveals that relations continued to develop towards the middle of the decade, despite Moscow’s protestations. Honecker was duly rewarded with a state visit to Beijing in 1986 for his efforts, the first by a Soviet-bloc leader after the onset of the Sino-Soviet Split. Chapters Four and Five show that amidst Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost the GDR and the PRC increasingly found ideological commonalities in preserving the political statusquo in East Berlin and Beijing. This dogmatic resistance towards political reforms would eventually lead to very different consequences in both countries.