China-GDR Relations from 1949 to 1989

Axel Berkofsky is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. He is the University of Pavia’s Delegate for Asia and the Asia-Pacific Region. Furthermore, Dr. Berkofsky is Co-Head of the Asia Centre at the Milan-based Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI) and Research Affiliate at the European Institute of Japanese Studies at the Stockholm School of Economics. Furthermore, he is co-founder and Executive Committee Board Member at the Stockholm-based European Japan Advanced Research Network (EJARN) and Member of the Executive Committee of the Canon Foundation.  Previously, Dr. Berkofsky has worked as Senior Policy Analyst and Senior Associate Policy Analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre (EPC) and Senior Research Fellow at the Brussels-based European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS). He has published books, numerous journal articles, essays, research papers and newspaper articles and is former freelance correspondent for the Asia Times. Axel has taught and lectured at numerous think tanks, research institutes and universities in Europe and Asia. His research interests are Chinese history, Cold War Politics and History in Asia, Japanese Chinese foreign and security policies and EU-China/EU-Japan relations.

• Chapter 1 - Relations from 1949 to the late 1950s and the beginning of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.- Chapter 2 - Late 1950 (end of China’s Great Leap Forward) until 1963 and the ‘Sino-Soviet Split’.- Chapter 3 - Mid-1960 until the very early 1980s and the resumption of Sino-East German relations.- Chapter 4 - The 1980s until Tiananmen and the Collapse of the GDR in 1989.

“Berkofsky is ambitiously trying to account for this bilateral relationship in its entirety in a succinct manuscript … . as a pioneering work in its field, it opens the way for more solid analyses in the future. This book strives to sift out the dynamics of historical relations from their official, ideological representations of the other side.” (Hanzhi Dai, Europe-Asia Studies, November 8, 2023)