Pankow and Peking

...In exchange, Red China supplies soy beans, ground nuts, cooking oil, split rice, timber, silks and textiles, vegetables, fruits, furs, wolfram, zinc, silver, mica, manganese, tobacco, teak, asbestos and pork...

...A large number of Party members, in fact, consider Red China the future Mecca of Communism, even though right now Moscow still calls the tune on the basic questions...

...Since then traffic between the two has been heavy with visitors at all levels...

...As in China, the peasants of East Germany have been communalized into 20,000 collective farms and several dozen “Socialist villages...

...When the Soviets have laid down the line, he has followed blindly...

...Like Communist China...

...Communal nurseries, dining halls and laundering establishments are being set up to relieve married women of the burdens of child care, cooking, house-cleaning and washing...

...The Red Chinese slogan, “Live together, eat together and learn together,” is being repeated by East German Communist leaders who have organized “Socialist house communities” where families have community-owned radio and television sets and where once a week all members —men, women and children—meet in the community-owned club room for political indoctrination...

...Today, East Germany is the second largest partner in Red Chinese industrialization (after the USSR...

...Until last May the Germans were copying Red Chinese methods in their campaign to merge collective farms into larger units with the purpose of ultimately forming communes of the Chinese type...

...As in China, the East German Communists are also using ideological persuasion to force private entrepreneurs to accept Government participation in their capital stock to the tune of 80 per cent—before total nationalization...

...But in June Ulbricht was echoing the Soviet view by denouncing communes as “unsuitable for East Germany...

...According to a very high-ranking East Berlin official, by the end of 1959 Peking’s indebtedness to East Germany had amounted to more than $1.5 billion...

...A typical case was the controversial issue of Chinese communes...

...These include a 1954 visit to East Germany by Premier Chou En-lai and other top Chinese leaders such as Chen Yi, Peng Te-huai and Chu Teh...

...This change will permit women to “participate more fully in production” and help in overcoming “bourgeois prejudice” against female labor...

...In East Germany today 49 per cent of the total working force is female...

...East Germany lies on the frontier of the Western world...

...In exchange, China gave East Germany blueprints on agricultural production, medicinal herbs, silk, textile machines and timber...

...East German Premier Otto Grotewohl even went so far as to charge India with “aggression” against China...

...Trade between the two countries has increased by leaps and bounds since 1950, when the first trade agreement was signed...

...The story is the same in the current Sino-Soviet ideological controversy...

...Scores of Red Chinese delegations, Party officials, defense experts and trade unionists have also visited and there are now 1,200 Chinese students studying at various technological schools in East Germany, among them 80 scientists doing practical work, 50 studying power station development and 25 studying metallurgy...

...He even denounced the Chinese position and stated that the Berlin question should not be solved by war...

...In both there has been an alarming deterioration in agriculture due to forced and rapid collectivization, and in both the major problem has remained raising the living standards...

...In Party circles in East Germany, there is great admiration for the Chinese leadership, especially for Mao Tse-tung, who is considered the greatest living Marxist since Stalin’s death...

...The “Socialist villages” are chiefly to train the new generation...

...As soon as the USSR gave the word on “peaceful coexistence” and denounced the Chinese concept of the “fatal inevitability of war,” Ulbricht echoed Moscow’s view on the subject...

...In the past 10 years, East Germany has built a sugar factory in Paotou with a daily capacity of 1,000 tons of sugar, a modern telephone factory in Changsha, a perlon factory in Shanghai, a planetarium in Peking, six scientific laboratories in Shanghai, Peking, Mukden, Nanking and elsewhere...

...Apart from these installations, East Germany also exports to China all types of machinery, hydroelectric plants, ships, locomotives, complete railway trains, electrical generators, refrigerator cars, chemical plants, cement, automobiles, television and radio sets, cameras, penicillin, tractors, fertilizers and metallurgical goods...

...Though there are few signs that Party leaders are deviating from the Moscow line, the East Germans took the Chinese side in the border dispute with India, thus defying the Soviet stand...

...economic problems...

...Early this year, the East German Deputy Premier and Minister of Trade, Heinrich Rau, visited Peking to sign a new trade agreement raising the volume of trade between the two countries in the next few years...

...EAST GERMANY is also very conscious of its share in assisting Red China’s industrialization program and simultaneously aware that one day China may be a vast market for East German products and a source of all the industrial raw material East Germany needs...

...Diplomatic relations between East Germany and Red China were established in 1949, immediately after the Communists set up Governments in Peking and Pankow...

...Yet, Party leader Walter Ulbricht has by no means shifted his ideological allegiance...

...They are as regimented as the communes of Red China, self-supporting units which run their own collective farms, supervise activities and train the new generation of Communist functionaries...

...All civil servants, white-collar workers and Army personnel are being mobilized for a month of “voluntary” work in various industrial enterprises and collective farms, and school teachers and school children, university students and professors alike, are being assigned to manual labor...

...the first one was set up early this year by merging a number of villages...

...Among young Communist officials there is a genuine enthusiasm for the Chinese achievement, particularly in the communes, and the Stalinist elements admire Red China because its outlook and theirs are similar...

...Both suffer from inferiority complexes because they are ignored by the majority of the nations of the world...

...Some 1.500 East German specialists are in China helping to build modern factories...

...In line with Red Chinese policies, the East Germans have also launched a campaign to transform the family and the role of women...

...And both face similar difficulties in the problems of Formosa and Hong Kong, and West Germany and Berlin...

...It has also built a factory to manufacture Chinese typewriters, supplied a large number of textile plants and built a factory to produce raw film for the Chinese movie industry...

...Workers in the factories and civil servants in Government offices meet five times weekly to discuss politics and production problems...

...This did not, however, stop the East Germans from building their communal dining halls, nurseries, etc...

...Inspired by the Chinese, the East Germans have also launched a mass mobilization of labor to solve their HEMEN RAY is an Indian journalist presently stationed in West Berlin...

...Such a program fulfills the dual function of solving the labor shortage and “acquainting” people with the life in farm and factory...

...There are many reasons for this attraction between the two countries...

...As in China, this accelerated collectivization is referred to as the “Great Leap Forward...

...Under the 1953 agreement East Germany also supplied China with 2,500 blueprints dealing with metallurgy, heavy machinery, electronic products and other industrial items...

...Such meetings are known as “Red meets” —and Mao Tse-tung was organizing them as early as 1942...