This chapter explores Sino–Soviet cooperation in the early to mid-1950s. The People’s Republic of China’s First Five-Year Plan sought to develop heavy industry by importing advanced technology from the Soviet Union. One-third of the Sino–Soviet collaboration projects were based in Manchuria, utilizing the physical infrastructure inherited from the pre–Chinese Communist Party era. Soviet experts in China and Chinese students and trainees in the Soviet Union played key roles in transferring Soviet technology. By learning from Soviet knowledge and skills and adapting them to suit Chinese conditions, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang gradually reduced their technological dependence on the Soviet Union while supporting other SOEs across China.

This chapter focuses on the years 1945–1948 to examine the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and Nationalist China’s efforts to reconstruct the region’s industry. During the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), China’s Nationalist Government developed heavy industry state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the inland region. Following Japan’s defeat, Manchuria was first occupied by Soviet military forces, who removed a considerable amount of industrial equipment from Angang and other Japanese enterprises to send it to the Soviet Union. Despite all the damage done during the Soviet occupation, Manchuria still had better industrial facilities than other parts of China. After the Soviet retreat in the spring of 1946, the Nationalist government consolidated and reorganized formerly Japanese enterprises into large-scale Chinese SOEs such as Angang. The Nationalists reconstructed these SOEs by employing Japanese engineers still staying there, while building on their experience running SOEs in the inland region and sending for Chinese managers and engineers from the inland. The Japanese and Nationalists thus unintentionally provided the foundations for the Chinese Communist Party’s socialist industrialization after 1948.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.

The conclusion encapsulates the book’s main arguments, discussing the role of Manchuria in modern China, the intricate interplay between technology transfers and national security, and the complex manifestation of power within Mao-era China’s socialist political economy. In doing so, it contextualizes Mao-era China within the broader global narrative of socialism and capitalism.

This chapter deals with the historiography of international law in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as other successor states of the Soviet Union. It examines how the understanding of international law has changed in this geographic space, depending on ideologies and needs of the time. Historical contributions and interpretations of outstanding international lawyers and diplomats such as Shafirov, Martens, Baron Taube, Hrabar (Grabar), Kozhevnikov and others are mapped and discussed. Moreover, the chapter also maps how Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars have understood the role of their respective countries in the global history of international law, especially the complex and sometimes problematic role of the Soviet Union and Russia.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

This chapter constructs a picture of the struggle waged by Indian leaders to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of national security and upholding popular conceptions of state sovereignty. Attention is given to the strategies adopted by New Delhi to co-opt the assistance of MI5 in containing Cold War threats, in the guise of indigenous communist movements and external pressures from China and the Soviet Union. Britain’s intelligence agencies made an effort to transition from a role centred on subduing nationalism to that of a trusted and valued supporter of the ruling Congress Party. Establishing strong security and intelligence links with India, British governments rationalised, would help to preserve their considerable national interests in South Asia; keep India ostensibly aligned with the West; act as a barrier to communist penetration of the subcontinent; and demonstrate to the United States that Britain remained a useful post-war partner. However, ideological tensions and differences produced uncoordinated bureaucratic responses that allowed the forces of internal and external communism to claim political and geographic space in the region.

Chapter Eight turns to what became a growing preoccupation for Rogers in the 1920s: politics. In his journalistic writing and live appearances, the humorist’s habitual survey of current events and public issues increasingly focused on the tendencies and foibles of American political life. He especially took aim at the pretension, dissembling, selfishness, and pomposity of both political parties and delighted in skewering Congress and various president’s for ineffective or foolish policies. He often described politics as "bunk." Rogers covered Republican and Democratic conventions, interviewed Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and spoke frequently with influential figures such as Bernard Baruch and Al Smith. Throughout, he stood squarely in the tradition of American populism, upholding the interests of average citizens and criticizing the privileges of social and economic elites. Rogers’ own political reputation peaked in 1928, when he was convinced to run a tongue-in-cheek campaign for the presidency.

The Cold War was the most important feature of the international system in the second half of the twentieth century. The rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States shaped the contours of conflict and cooperation among states and peoples between 1945 and 1991 and its dynamics permeated almost all corners of the globe. Whether in Baghdad, Bangkok or Brussels, the influence of geopolitical and ideological conflict was unmistakable. The Cold War created rivalries and political faultlines that have continued to shape international relations years after its passing. Sino-American competition has become so intense that many think the world is on the brink of another period of bipolar rivalry.

This chapter examines Iran’s growing security interests in Africa during the 1970s, as its sphere of influence broadened following the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971. The shah spoke in this period about his Indian Ocean policy – the plan to form an economic and security union of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, which would work together to free the area from imperial power interference. This formed the basis of Iran’s grand strategy in the mid- to late 1970s. The chapter explores Iran’s increasing preoccupation with Soviet expansion in the Horn of Africa, and how this prompted the shah to develop relations with countries such as Sudan and, after the Ethiopian Revolution and the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974, Somalia.

This chapter covers Russian–Ukrainian relations during pre-Soviet times (ninth century CE until about 1921), the Soviet era (1921–1991), and the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991 and the Euromaidan revolution of 2014. The lands that form present-day Ukraine have been inhabited by independent-minded peoples for centuries. Ukrainian identity began to take on a national character in the 1800s, when writers and activists set up a sprawling network of political movements pursuing an independent Ukraine. The Soviet era was marked by periods of intense suffering: the famines of the 1930s and the slaughters of World War II, during which millions of Ukrainians died as a result of both war and policy. After the Soviet Union came undone in 1991, relations between Russia and independent Ukraine gradually soured after the 2004 Orange Revolution and especially the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Over the course of this period, a shift away from ethno-nationalism and towards a civic national identity took place in the country, with especially Russian-speaking Ukrainians ‘shedding’ parts of their ‘Russian-ness’.

The first half of the 1990s saw significant developments in the former Soviet and East European region: the attempted coup of August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev, the dissolution of the union, and the subsequent struggle in the 15 newly independent former republics to bring about significant social and economic change. There has been armed conflict in a series of these republics. In Russia there has been an armed attack on the parliament and its dissolution at the behest of the president, two national elections, simmering tension with a number of its neighbours, and continuing concern over the effects of economic reform, culminating in the December 1995 electoral success of the communist party. In Eastern Europe countries have been struggling with the legacy left by the communist regimes that collapsed in 1989. In a number of these countries communists returned to power via the ballot box. And, of course, the region was overshadowed by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars of Yugoslav succession. Despite this record of dramatic and important developments, this region has been of less concern to Australian foreign-policy makers than was the case during the Cold War.

The extent to which Australian foreign policy was reoriented between 1991 and 1995 is evident from an examination of the last edition of Australia in World Affairs. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union still loomed large in world affairs; the alliance with the United States correspondingly remained central to Australian foreign policy. Efforts by the Hawke Government to engage more closely with Asia in these years had frequently been rebuffed, so that Fedor Mediansky was able to write at the end of the decade not of closer engagement with the region, but of ’Australia’s diminished regional standing’. Australia’s ’shift towards Asia’ gathered momentum in the first half of the 1990s. Some important foundations for this trend were laid in the later 1980s, especially in immigration patterns, trade and tourism. The desirability of this shift was articulated in a range of official reports and statements, including the Fitzgerald Report on immigration, the Garnaut Report on Australia’s relations with Northeast Asia, and the Foreign Minister’s statement Australia’s Regional Security, all produced before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the definitive ending of the Cold War.

Australia’s international environment in the first half of the 1990s was heavily conditioned by global trends that had gathered force over the preceding decade. Among these trends were the internationalisation of production and of financial and commodity markets; the emergence of a technologically borderless world, characterised by new media, information and communication networks and symbolised above all by the World Wide Web; and within this context of globalisation, the rise of new centres of economic and technological power, very notably in East Asia. The increasingly widespread influence of free (or at least liberal) market ideology could be seen as concomitant with these changes, in part reflecting them, in part driving them. And interlinked with these phenomena at the geostrategic level there was the waning of the Cold War. While the Soviet implosion of the later 1980s might not have ushered in any new world order, it did signify the demise of certain verities – including superpower ideological rivalry, strategic bipolarity, and nuclear arms racing – which had done much to structure the pattern of international relationships for four decades.

The relationship between Australia and the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe has been characterised by considerable distrust. The isolation and fear of the danger posed by hostile powers was a recurrent theme in the consciousness of colonial Australians, a fear which took a precise Russian focus at the time of the Crimean War, the British–Russian tensions in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the establishment of a Russian Pacific fleet based at Vladivostok. A whole infrastructure of distrust stemming from the 1917 revolution and the perceived expansionist aims of the Bolshevik government was built upon this historical basis. This feeling, shared by much of the Western world, was stimulated enormously by the Cold War and by the effect on public debate in Australia of the large number of articulate refugees from both the Soviet Union and those states of Eastern Europe which were part of the Soviet orbit. This prevailing sense of distrust has structured the Australian approach to the Soviet Union and its allies throughout the postwar period.