Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

In the 1950s, China started its road towards becoming a major natural rubber producer with huge fluctuations and costs. In response to the Western economic blockade, China and the Soviet Union started it as the alleged second-largest joint economic item in 1951, with an investment of 70 million rubles. However, the evolution of the global economic cold war since the end of 1952 resulted in a dramatic shrinkage of this Sino-Soviet cooperation, which in turn caused bilateral resentments and heavy losses on the side of China. Since then, though the Soviet Union still maintained influences in some fields until the end of the 1950s, this socialist enterprise relied more and more on those elements related to the West and Southeast Asia, even in the heyday of China’s socialist construction of the Great Leap Forward.