East Germany: Peking-Pankow Axis?

Extract

To the ordinary man in the drab East German street Communist China is a bore: it strikes him that the main use of this remote and shadowy ally is to help inflate the numerical strength of the “socialist camp” by a few useful hundreds of million souls. He realises that this is meant to overcome his feeling of isolation, to convince him that he is allied not only with a collection of uncouth Balkan tribes and formidable but unloved Russians, but also with a nation that can be claimed to be among the oldest civilised countries of the world, that had invented gunpowder long before even a German monk, Berthold Schwarz, invented it for the West. But on the whole the exploitation of the cultural prestige of the Chinese ally is poverty stricken and inept. Reprints of pre-war editions of a few Chinese novels like The Dream of the Red Chamber, an occasional art book of Chinese paintings or an edition by the publishing house of the Ministry of National Defence of an old Chinese Treatise on the Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated from the Russian, hardly carry great weight or conviction.