Open Collections

Abstract

This thesis traces the construction and forced dismantling of the transnational publishing network between the People’s Republic of China and the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1963. Drawing primarily on archival materials from the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, supplemented by published Chinese-language institutional chronicles, this study reconstructs the institutional infrastructure through which ideological texts circulated between Beijing and East Berlin. It argues that this publishing network reveals a structural gap between party-state political positioning and the operational reality of propaganda. The publishers who mediated between state doctrine and its material circulation across borders developed an institutional logic of their own that eventually diverged from the political intentions of party leadership. Rooted initially in personal connections and dependent on Soviet intermediary channels, the network was formalized under the 1955 bilateral cultural agreement, which delegated substantial operational authority to local actors. By the late 1950s, the infrastructure had acquired its own institutional momentum, even as the bilateral relations were shifting. The abrupt shutdown ordered by the East German party leadership in 1960 exposed the scale of this divergence, and the visible dismantling of jointly built infrastructure became a source of bilateral tension, which further intensified into the open dispute between the two states in 1963. By framing the study of propaganda institutions within the historiography of Cold War socialist diplomacy, this thesis explores how the infrastructure of propaganda operated across national borders and shaped the dynamics of socialist interstate relations.