The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History by Austin Jersild

Austin Jersild's monograph approaches the Sino-Soviet alliance from below. How did it work on the ground? How did Soviet and East-Central European diplomats, advisers and specialists perceive the People's Republic of China (PRC)? How did Chinese cadres experience the contacts with these foreigners? Drawing on archival sources from the PRC, the former Soviet Union, the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), the late Czechoslovakia, and the United States, Jersild pieces together a rich texture of daily interactions, from friendships to illicit love affairs, conflicts, and misunderstandings. The book is an important corrective to general misconceptions about China's relations with the Communist world, particularly with the Soviet Union, in the 1950s and 1960s. Previous scholars, who were influenced by politics or hampered by incomplete archival access, tended to disregard these multilayered relations or portray them in the mutually exclusive shades of black and white. Avoiding many of the inherent methodological and evidentiary...