Introduction
On 20 October 1987, Alan Wendt, the US State Department’s representative for strategic technology policy, urgently convened the representatives of all CoCom member states in Washington and requested the cancellation of a session scheduled for six days later in Paris, where further relaxation of export controls on China was to be discussed.Footnote 1 CoCom, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, was an informal regime linking NATO members (except Iceland) and Japan to regulate exports to the Warsaw Pact and China.Footnote 2 By limiting transfers of strategically sensitive goods and technologies, it functioned as a central instrument in structuring the Cold War’s economic and technological order. The immediate trigger for Wendt’s intervention was Iran’s deployment of Chinese-made ‘Silkworm’ missiles during the Iran–Iraq War, which posed a direct threat to US vessels and citizens in the Gulf.Footnote 3 The Paris meeting was cancelled with little discussion.Footnote 4 Yet this appearance of agreement masked more complex political calculations within the regime. As the West German representative observed, Washington’s intervention was less a substantive policy reversal than a diplomatic signal to Beijing, intended to secure greater alignment with the broader arms embargo rather than to halt the ongoing process of liberalisation.Footnote 5 This approach, however, made it difficult for West German officials to justify the asymmetry of a regime that, despite the logic of détente, maintained strict controls on the Warsaw Pact while increasingly relaxing restrictions on China.
Using West Germany’s experience of the China embargo in the 1950s and the liberalisation of export controls towards China in the 1980s as an analytical lens, this article interrogates a broader paradox at the heart of the Cold War export control regime: how a regime designed to enforce technological disconnection came to generate new forms of global connectivity. It argues that this transformation can only be understood by foregrounding asymmetries within the Western alliance and CoCom’s role as an institutionalised site of transit. In doing so, the article reframes globalisation during the Cold War as a process structured by selective connectivity rather than by simple integration or division.
Recent scholarship in global history has moved beyond framing globalisation in terms of a binary opposition between connection and disconnection.Footnote 6 Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci, and Roland Wenzlhuemer have advanced the concept of ‘dis:connectivity’ to capture the dynamic interplay of multiple, coexisting forms of connection and non-connection.Footnote 7 From this perspective, connections are neither singular nor stable, but emerge as ‘bundles’ of heterogeneous strands—some facilitating exchange, others delaying, redirecting, or blocking it.Footnote 8 Disconnection, therefore, does not negate globalisation, but is constitutive of it. Building on this conceptual shift, this article approaches CoCom as a particularly revealing site for analysing such dis:connective dynamics. Rather than simply enforcing technological separation across the Cold War divide, CoCom operated as a dense institutional space in which diplomatic, commercial, technological, and informal forms of connection were continuously negotiated, recalibrated, and selectively enabled. In this sense, the regime did not merely restrict flows but contributed to new pathways and forms of mediated connectivity.
This approach also resonates with a growing body of work that conceptualises international organisations as key sites of global connections.Footnote 9 As Akira Iriye has argued, international organisations can facilitate, steer, and at times resist globalisation.Footnote 10 Although CoCom rested on a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and remained an informal intergovernmental arrangement, its procedures, committees, control lists, and channels of communication nonetheless made it a site of institutional coordination. This framing, in turn, allows the notion of transit, hitherto largely associated with maritime vessels, to be extended to the institutional realm.Footnote 11 CoCom operated through a multilayered apparatus of committees and negotiations that selectively governed the circulation of goods and technologies. Its central node in the US Embassy in Paris, connected to member states through advanced telecommunication systems, enabled near-instantaneous coordination, while control lists were continuously renegotiated across different institutional levels and political arenas. Alongside this institutional architecture, dense bilateral and corporate interactions further shaped the terms of circulation, often stretching or undermining the very regulatory principles CoCom sought to enforce. At its various negotiating interfaces—between member states, between members and controlled states, between companies and their governments, and between companies and controlled states—multiple, overlapping, and often competing temporal-spatial logics converged around the same objects, revealing transit as a contested and co-produced process rather than a neutral passage.
Historians have largely approached CoCom through the prism of the ‘economic Cold War’, focusing on both its institutional architecture and the divergent practices of its member states. While much of this literature addresses the socialist bloc as a whole, it consistently highlights the tensions embedded within the CoCom system itself.Footnote 12 Yasuhara Yoko, for instance, demonstrates that the embargo regime emerged out of substantial disagreement, not only within the US government between military hardliners and the more flexible State Department, but also between Washington and its European allies, whose reliance on East–West trade made them resistant to broad US embargo demands.Footnote 13 Cui Pi also emphasises these internal tensions, arguing that the Reagan administration’s increasing recourse to sanctions intensified centrifugal pressures within CoCom and contributed to its eventual dissolution in 1994.Footnote 14 Political science scholarship at the time likewise offered broad assessments contrasting the US preference for comprehensive control lists with Western European support for a more limited small-list approach.Footnote 15 Taken together, this literature provides a foundation for analysing intra-alliance asymmetries, but remains largely confined to the level of policy disagreement, paying limited attention to concrete practices of restriction. This article shifts the focus to these practices and their effects, examining how export controls targeting China shaped the operation and limits of the CoCom regime.
Studies of CoCom controls on China have most often proceeded through a predominantly US-centred lens, albeit with some attention to other Western actors.Footnote 16 Much of this literature has focused on how Japan and Britain attempted to reconcile US strategic imperatives with their own economic interests, an understandable emphasis, given Japan’s geographic and cultural proximity to China and Britain’s stake in Hong Kong and wider interests in South-East Asia.Footnote 17 More recent studies have moved beyond explanations grounded solely in great-power geopolitics, showing how competition from Japan and Western European countries pressured Washington to relax export restrictions at both unilateral and multilateral levels.Footnote 18 Yet allied states continue to appear primarily as external constraints on US policy rather than as differently positioned actors within an asymmetrical alliance order.
West Germany’s limited political room for manoeuvre offers a particularly instructive vantage point for examining the dynamics of export control coordination.Footnote 19 Although Bonn also supported a relaxation of controls on China for economic reasons, its policy remained filtered through the imperatives of German unification and the overriding importance of maintaining stable arrangements with both the United States and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, this translated into a position largely aligned with US policy, one that persisted beyond the end of the occupation regime, as the constitutional commitment to eventual unification implied a more circumscribed understanding of sovereignty.Footnote 20 The security doctrine pursued since the Willy Brandt era, a dual strategy combining anchoring in the Western alliance (Westbindung) with engagement towards Eastern Europe (Neue Ostpolitik), repeatedly came into tension with CoCom’s evolving efforts to grant special treatment to China. On the one hand, Bonn sought to act as a coordinator within CoCom, positioning itself as a balancing force within emerging Western European consensus when economic interests diverged from those of the United States.Footnote 21 On the other hand, it adopted a cautious stance towards the liberalisation of controls on China, wary that any formalised preferential treatment might provoke Soviet opposition.
This article draws primarily on German archival sources from the Federal Chancellery, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Economics, the Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT), and the Ministry of Defence (BMVg), complemented by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files from the US National Archives, selected Chinese materials from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and a small number of British Foreign Office files. It examines different categories of controlled trade, ranging from a broad spectrum of industrial goods in the 1950s to military equipment and advanced technologies in the late Cold War. These shifts reflected changing and contested understandings of what constituted strategically significant goods.Footnote 22 The early China embargo covered a broad range of goods, including as many as 207 items outside the CoCom control lists, since even basic or outdated products could have significant effects given China’s level of economic development.Footnote 23 As controls were gradually relaxed from the late 1970s onwards, the focus increasingly narrowed to military equipment and advanced, particularly dual-use technologies such as telecommunications.
This article begins by examining the Coordinating Committee for China (ChinCom) in the 1950s, established in response to the Korean War. Even at a time when the United States possessed considerable economic leverage to enforce its embargo through foreign aid, the absence of a coherent Western strategy proved a persistent feature of the ChinCom. West Germany’s constrained sovereignty and dependence on the Western alliance obligated it to comply with the strictest export controls imposed by Washington. Yet alternative export channels emerged, generating dense grey-market linkages that exposed both the limits of these controls and their unintended role in fostering new patterns of global interconnection.
The second section turns to the late 1970s and 1980s, when member states, driven by economic interests, expanded exports of military goods to China while progressively legitimising its exceptional status, thereby eroding the regime’s core security principles. In the absence of an immediate military threat, commercial considerations frequently outweighed strategic caution.Footnote 24 West Germany’s sensitivity to Soviet reactions, given that Moscow continued to view Beijing as a major threat well into the mid-1980s, placed West German companies at a competitive disadvantage, while preferential treatment for China became a key argument for relaxing controls across the CoCom system as a whole. The final section develops a microhistorical case study of Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) in the satellite-communications sector, showing how economic actors operating across overlapping institutional spaces reshaped CoCom’s security framework.
The disproportionate embargo and rerouting trade
In January 1950, CoCom began operations under the leadership of the Consultative Group (CG), which had been established in Paris the previous month. At that point, no export restrictions had yet been imposed on trade with Beijing.Footnote 25 The United States remained undecided as to whether China should be integrated into the global trading system or subjected to strategic export controls. Against this backdrop, tentative signs in the spring of 1950 even suggested a possible revival of Sino-German trade relations.Footnote 26 Yet the room for such uncertainty began to narrow after the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, which strengthened US concerns about China’s alignment with the Soviet-led socialist bloc. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 accelerated this shift. Within a month, the United States revoked all existing export licences.Footnote 27 In October, the conflict escalated further when Mao Zedong deployed Chinese forces into the Korean Peninsula.Footnote 28 From 1 June 1951 onwards, Washington required licences for all exports to China.Footnote 29 Although armistice negotiations began as early as July 1951, active hostilities continued, as both sides sought to improve their bargaining position through military means. The economic isolation of Beijing thus emerged as a central pillar of Western policy towards China. At US initiative, CG member states established ChinCom in November 1952 as a distinct body within the broader export control system, thereby institutionalising the Western trade embargo against China.Footnote 30 This more restrictive treatment of China was later referred to as the China differential.
The embargo did not end China’s efforts to preserve commercial ties with Western economies. Beijing still needed machinery, equipment, and precision instruments essential to socialist construction, many of which could be obtained only from West Germany and other advanced industrial economies. The embargo therefore created a tangible geographical barrier, but it did not produce a complete rupture. Instead, it encouraged rerouting. After learning in December 1950 of impending US economic countermeasures, China’s Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission instructed Chinese agencies to expedite shipments of ‘existing orders already placed’ with suppliers in West Germany, other European countries, and the sterling area ‘as quickly as possible’. Where this was not feasible, remittances were to be withdrawn or redirected towards immediately available spot purchases ‘so as to save time’.Footnote 31
This section examines two such cases—the re-export of West German goods via East Berlin and British companies—to demonstrate how, even under embargo conditions, goods reached China through transit and trans-shipment mechanisms. These cases reveal that the embargo did not block the flow of restricted products to China; rather, it created commercial opportunities for intermediaries and raised coordination costs for member states. In this sense, ChinCom reshaped patterns of circulation by encouraging indirect trading routes within a system ostensibly designed to enforce disconnection.
The embargo, originally envisaged as a uniform measure across all participating states, affected West German businesses especially strongly due to West Germany’s limited sovereignty and constrained political latitude. Under the Occupation Statute and Military Government Law No. 53, the Allied High Commission (AHC) could intervene in individual export transactions.Footnote 32 In Bonn, supporters of the embargo ultimately prevailed despite internal disagreements, presenting it as an ‘effective political instrument’ in the struggle against communist states.Footnote 33 This stance was shaped not least by US economic and military assistance, but also by the broader objective of consolidating West Germany’s integration into the Western bloc.Footnote 34 As foreign policy considerations took precedence over economic interests, Bonn relegated trade with China to the margins of its political agenda. Although the expiration of the Marshall Plan in late 1951 weakened the efficacy of these restrictions, and despite Bundestag discussions on expanding East–West trade, West Germany remained under close US supervision.Footnote 35 Commercial relations with China therefore remained largely informal and were not institutionalised through government-to-government trade agreements.
German companies active in China before the Second World War nonetheless sought to re-establish their commercial presence. Their commercial ties with China had once been substantial. In 1936, imports from and exports to China accounted for 2.7% and 2.8% respectively of Germany’s total foreign trade; as a share of total trade, the latter figure exceeded even the peak level of German exports to China during the 1980s.Footnote 36 The tightening embargo regime disrupted these established commercial networks, prompting business associations to advocate new frameworks for East–West trade. Among these initiatives was the China-Arbeitskreis (China Working Group), established in October 1952 within the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft (German Eastern Business Association), a legally independent body with close ties to the West German Ministry for Economic Affairs.Footnote 37 It argued that West Germany should emulate the British approach, in which the semi-official China Association negotiated with Beijing, even though London and Beijing maintained diplomatic relations at chargé d’affaires level and could have acted through formal channels.Footnote 38 This logic materialised in 1957, when representatives of the Ost-Ausschuss travelled to China and concluded the first bilateral trade agreement, although the agreement remained valid for only one year and had limited practical effect.Footnote 39 To accommodate the semi-official status of the Ost-Ausschuss, the Chinese signatory was not the central government but the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), a state-sponsored semi-official organisation established in the early 1950s partly in response to the US-led trade embargo.Footnote 40 Both governments merely acknowledged the agreement through an exchange of letters.Footnote 41 Until the establishment of diplomatic relations, it remained the only bilateral trade agreement of its kind between the two countries.
Other organisations such as the Deutsche China-Gesellschaft (DCG, German China Society) also formed part of a broader China lobby within West German business circles.Footnote 42 The DCG even received visiting Chinese delegations from East Berlin and hinted at the possibility of establishing official relations between the two countries without any authorisation from the federal government.Footnote 43 Such initiatives revealed the tension between Bonn’s political alignment with the Western embargo and the commercial interests of West German companies.
The most accessible interlocutors for West German companies in the early 1950s were Chinese representatives and trade missions operating in East Berlin and East Germany. These companies showed little hesitation in engaging with trade organisations that Beijing had established there for explicitly political purposes. During the negotiations for a Sino-East German trade agreement in 1950, both sides directed their attention towards West Germany.Footnote 44 East Germany sought to channel all Sino-West German trade through its own territory, positioning itself as an intermediary between Beijing and Bonn and presenting this arrangement as a means of preserving a semblance of German economic unity.Footnote 45 Beijing, for its part, was prepared to accommodate these preferences, not least because the embargo created an acute dependence on West German industrial goods.
Out of these negotiations emerged the China Export Corporation (CEC), formally organised as a GmbH (limited-liability company) but in practice operating as an extension of the East German Ministry of Foreign Trade.Footnote 46 Bonn attempted to classify the CEC as illegal and to prohibit West German companies from entering into contractual relations with it; however, enforcing such restrictions proved difficult.Footnote 47 West German business associations such as the Ost-Ausschuss concluded that the CEC had become a fait accompli: if West German companies refused to route transactions through the CEC, business would simply pass to competitors in countries such as Britain or France.Footnote 48
Although the CEC soon proved incapable of fulfilling its ambitious mandate, it nonetheless maintained a channel through which goods could reach China.Footnote 49 In practice, it functioned as ‘an extended and largely unregulated inter-zonal trade mechanism’.Footnote 50 Evidence of these clandestine operations often surfaces only indirectly through cases uncovered by the authorities. In 1955, Die Zeit reported on a case dating back to 1951–53, in which the haulier Knopke smuggled precision instruments from the Askania plant in West Berlin into East Berlin, from where they were forwarded to China via the CEC.Footnote 51 Such incidents were likely only the visible portion of a much larger trade. In 1951, the Panamanian-flagged vessel Montesa, under the effective control of a Chinese company, prepared in Hamburg to load transit cargo originating in East Germany and destined for China.Footnote 52 East German authorities attempted to exploit the legal definition of ‘transit goods’, which were not formally subject to export restrictions, by routing the cargo through the Hamburg free port. The US Consul intervened directly to block the loading. Hamburg, still mindful of the recent Morella episode, an attempted shipment to China during which its effort to resist US intervention had failed, promptly acquiesced.Footnote 53 Although the shipment was prevented from leaving Hamburg, it eventually reached China through a port in the Low Countries.Footnote 54 Repeated US interventions in similar cases prompted Bonn to tighten its supervision of strategic goods reconsigned through the Hamburg free port. By the following year, the US Department of State and the Mutual Security Agency acknowledged that West Germany had made progress, while criticising the Free Port of Antwerp for continuing to permit extensive illicit re-export.Footnote 55
Beijing also adapted its institutional presence in Europe to this rerouting economy. In 1953, it established a branch of the China National Import and Export Corporation (CNIEC) at the Johannishof Hotel in East Berlin. A CIA assessment described the office as strategically significant, noting that it served as the main purchaser of strategic goods in Western Europe needed to support the Chinese war effort on the Korean Peninsula.Footnote 56 Beijing continued to take East Germany’s special interests into account. CNIEC avoided signing contracts directly with West German companies; instead, it transferred contracts to the CEC for formal signature, while providing confirmation through separate letters.Footnote 57 The arrangement thus rested on mutual accommodation: Beijing acquired an institutional foothold in Europe, while East Berlin retained a formal intermediary role in Sino-West German trade. Nor was East Berlin the only such conduit. Goods that could no longer be obtained directly from West Germany could be routed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other socialist-bloc intermediaries.Footnote 58 By 1956, French officials were already describing this situation as ‘grotesque’.Footnote 59 West German authorities similarly acknowledged considerable opportunities for evasion, not only through East European re-export routes but also through inadequate trans-shipment controls in certain Western countries.Footnote 60
Companies and intermediaries in several states participating in the embargo, most notably Britain, became involved in forwarding restricted goods to China. These practices undermined the very vision of a world market from which China was to be excluded and demonstrated the limits of the strategy of economic containment. A directive issued by China’s Ministry of Foreign Trade in October 1955 revealed Beijing’s acute awareness of Bonn’s weak position in trade with China. It instructed that ‘non-embargoed goods ordinarily purchased from West Germany were to be sourced from other countries whenever feasible’ and stipulated that:
Only where procurement from West Germany was unavoidable should orders be placed, and in such cases they were to be handled exclusively through the Chinese representative office in East Berlin. Goods falling under the West German embargo were to be obtained through re-export channels. Where purchases were arranged through a third party, specifically a non-West German intermediary, letters of credit were to be issued to that intermediary on a non-transferable and indivisible basis. Under these conditions, Chinese buyers could still acquire West German products indirectly.Footnote 61
These instructions reveal that the ‘third party’ played an even more consequential role than East Berlin itself in constructing the grey zones of global commerce. US records show that Washington recognised very early the centrality of transit trade and trans-shipments in circumventing controls on strategic goods, describing them as a ‘significant loophole in the international security trade control effort’ and repeatedly expressing frustration at British non-cooperation.Footnote 62 Britain’s colonial trading system, particularly its maritime shipping routes, provided multiple opportunities to bypass controls.Footnote 63 West German companies, too, made use of British shipping networks to deliver goods to China, although these operations remained under continuous surveillance by US authorities.
A 1954 case illustrates these dynamics. Cornelis Goinga, a trade control officer with the US High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG), received information indicating that the Bremen-based company Westerschulte, Wegener & Co. intended to ship 2,000 Dodge-brand truck wheels to a business partner in Shanghai via the London company MacDonald, Hall & Co. Ltd. Goinga urged Bonn to investigate the case and accused the company of repeated involvement in illicit trade with China.Footnote 64 On 8 April 1954, one day before the freighter Kieldrecht was scheduled to depart from Rotterdam, Bonn revoked the export licences of the companies involved without conducting a formal inquiry. Most of the wheels were offloaded in Rotterdam, but a portion stored at the bottom of the ship’s hold could not be unloaded in time; it was discharged in Hong Kong before continuing to China.Footnote 65
Britain also demonstrated a willingness to confront the United States over the easing of controls, especially after the expiration of US economic aid weakened a key instrument of leverage. The most striking example was Britain’s unilateral abolition of the China differential in 1957. After the end of the Korean War, British officials increasingly regarded the more restrictive controls as anachronistic, but consultations with the United States produced no tangible progress.Footnote 66 The tractor incident of 1956 further highlighted Britain’s assertiveness within CoCom. The case concerned a British request for an exceptional licence to export heavy agricultural tractors exceeding 50 horsepower, which the United States considered to have potential strategic value, whereas Western European countries insisted on their overwhelmingly civilian use.Footnote 67 The United States was the only country to oppose the British export licence. London nonetheless disregarded Washington’s veto.Footnote 68 France went even further, exporting tractors valued at US$540,000 to China without prior notification to CoCom.Footnote 69
West Germany’s limited political room for manoeuvre allowed it only to engage in what officials described as ‘candid discussion’ when submitting its request to export 150 tractors. The US response consisted merely of a terse rejection. The German Foreign Office subsequently reduced its request to an exceptional licence for thirty tractors and justified it by invoking the French and British precedents as well as the dire condition of the German tractor industry. It emphasised that this was an isolated case and that Bonn had scrupulously adhered to the licensing principles outlined in US diplomatic notes.Footnote 70 Somewhat ironically, when Bonn continued to pursue a conciliatory line towards Washington’s position even after London’s unilateral lifting of the China differential, Washington rewarded Bonn at the CoCom meeting by approving its original request to export 150 tractors.Footnote 71
Exceptional approvals thus became an instrument through which the United States encouraged West Germany’s continued support for the broader embargo regime. West German exporters, however, increasingly regarded the system as unfair and discriminatory. They collected press reports on British trade activities and submitted them to the federal government.Footnote 72 British authorities themselves acknowledged that their shipping list was, in practice, enforced no more strictly than the existing international embargo regulations.Footnote 73 The consequences of this unequal treatment are illustrated in the recollections of Hans Wilhelm Siegel, who worked at Bayer AG’s liaison office in Hong Kong during the 1950s. He recalled that Bayer was compelled to channel its China-related business through a small London-based intermediary, as direct trade with the Chinese mainland remained prohibited for West German companies.Footnote 74
The Bundestag also recognised this unequal competitive landscape. In 1956, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician Hermann Schwann, serving as the DCG’s political liaison in Bonn, criticised the delegation of negotiating authority to the private gremium Ost-Ausschuss and called for the establishment of a permanent German commercial mission in China.Footnote 75 He argued that 80 per cent of West German exports to China were being channelled through third countries, a pattern that exposed both the diminished competitiveness of West German companies and the missed opportunities inherent in the absence of direct commercial relations.Footnote 76 Schwann’s intervention contributed to the conclusion of the 1957 bilateral trade agreement, although the agreement was negotiated by the Ost-Ausschuss.
From the initially broad consensus surrounding the embargo to the increasingly fragmented landscape that emerged after the end of the Korean War, the evolution of transit and trans-shipment networks reveals a striking pattern. Strategic goods that could no longer be procured directly from West Germany still reached China indirectly, whether through East Berlin and the socialist bloc, or via Western European countries where enforcement of embargo regulations, as in the case of British companies, remained relatively lax. These indirect routes transformed what had once been a bilateral trading relationship into complex configurations, producing a–b–c or even a–b–c–d supply chains. The examples discussed above also show that East Germany not only exploited this network but also used it to strengthen its commercial links with West German businesspeople. Britain, for its part, consolidated its relative position in East Asian trade at West Germany’s expense; officials in the German Foreign Office went so far as to describe Hong Kong as ‘a sieve’ for British exports.Footnote 77
The emergence of the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s made the Soviet bloc less viable as a transit zone for Chinese access to Western industrial goods. East Germany’s alignment with Moscow further diminished East Berlin’s earlier intermediary role. CoCom members initiated a gradual, though often internally contradictory, relaxation of control measures.Footnote 78 At the same time, China deepened its commercial relations with Western European countries and Japan, treating them as alternatives to Soviet-style modernisation.Footnote 79 West Germany, however, continued to occupy a politically vulnerable position within the Western export control regime. This became evident in 1964, when Sino-West German negotiations over a bilateral trade agreement in Bern collapsed as a direct result of US intervention, and again in 1965, when Bonn issued an export guarantee for a cold-rolling mill project involving a European consortium headed by a West German company.Footnote 80 Washington responded with considerable anger, while Bonn could do little more than defend the project as a European contract; both France and Britain ignored US criticism.Footnote 81
Although China’s role within CoCom in the 1960s and during China’s period of self-imposed isolation in the Cultural Revolution still merits closer examination, this article argues that the institutionalisation of preferential treatment for China within CoCom from the late 1970s onwards, driven by the US desire to counterbalance the Soviet Union, most clearly exposes the internal dynamics of economic competition among member states. As national industries sought to secure advantages in the Chinese market, restricted goods increasingly flowed towards Chinese ports. A regime conceived to produce a disconnected technological order in the name of security thus came to accommodate, and in some respects facilitate, new forms of connection.
From disconnected security regimes to connected trade networks: Dynamic geopolitics and enduring economic interests
As China’s involvement in Vietnam deepened in 1966, the US State Department launched a systematic internal review of China policy and export controls.Footnote 82 China re-emerged as a substantive issue during the 1968–69 CoCom list review, when member states renegotiated the scope of the so-called second China differential and retained additional restrictions on forty-two items considered relevant to China’s nuclear programme. As Western perceptions of China’s geopolitical position changed, however, controls on China had largely converged with those applied to the Soviet Union by the mid-1970s.Footnote 83 This trajectory unfolded amid persistent divergences among CoCom member states, which continued to shape intra-CoCom dynamics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Although a general consensus emerged in favour of easing restrictions, liberalisation was driven as much by economic competition as by strategic realignment. The result was not simply a weakening of CoCom’s security principles, but its transformation into a negotiated space through which selective technological circulation could be enabled, delayed, or politically obscured.
For West Germany, the adjustment of export controls towards China proved particularly difficult to reconcile with its broader Cold War strategy. The Sino-Soviet border clashes coincided with the emergence of Neue Ostpolitik, under which Bonn prioritised détente with Moscow. The Soviet Union regarded China as a major strategic adversary and closely monitored West German interactions with Beijing, occasionally issuing warnings to Bonn.Footnote 84 West German policymakers therefore treated China initiatives with particular caution.Footnote 85 Even the Ost-Ausschuss, which represented West German economic interests, aligned itself with this approach. Trade with the Warsaw Pact far exceeded trade with China, and Soviet officials were fully aware of the Ost-Ausschuss’s semi-official character.
Bonn maintained this cautious line even when initiatives emerged below the federal level. China understood Bonn’s restrictive posture and therefore did not seek to discuss arms transactions directly with federal authorities. Yet subnational actors and individual defence manufacturers occasionally attempted to open such channels. One prominent example was Heinz-Herbert Karry (FDP), the Economics Minister of Hesse, who maintained close ties to business circles active in trade with China.Footnote 86 During his 1977 visit to China, Karry suggested granting Chinese specialists access to defence-industrial facilities in Hesse and indicated that several companies in his delegation could supply military products and technologies.Footnote 87 When a Chinese delegation of six general staff officers accepted the invitation to visit Hesse in 1978, Bonn immediately distanced itself from the initiative and denied any federal involvement.Footnote 88 Once such overtures reached Bonn, federal authorities rejected them unequivocally and made clear that no export licences would be granted.
Bonn’s rejection of subnational initiatives did not mean that China remained peripheral to Western export-control debates. On the contrary, the late 1970s saw a cautious reassessment of restrictions on China across several CoCom member states. Scholars generally agree that Washington promoted closer relations with Beijing in order to incorporate China into a wider containment framework directed against Moscow.Footnote 89 Relaxing restrictions on military-related equipment formed part of this recalibration, although the Carter administration remained constrained by domestic opposition from the Taiwan lobby.Footnote 90 Washington therefore also looked to its allies to support the modernisation of the Chinese armed forces by easing restrictions on selected categories of strategic exports.Footnote 91
Britain pursued a similar logic. The future of Hong Kong constrained London’s willingness to take risks, while Beijing’s turn towards economic modernisation reduced the appeal of high-cost arms sales.Footnote 92 By 1979, Britain was already engaged in negotiations with China over the Harrier fighter jet and had expressed interest in supplying targeting and reconnaissance technologies for land and naval forces, items listed both on the CoCom munitions list and on the strategic goods list.Footnote 93 To facilitate such exports, Britain proposed the so-called ‘no-comment’ principle as a means of streamlining the approval process. Under this arrangement, export requests would be considered approved unless another member state raised an explicit objection within a designated time frame. Rather than initiating a formal debate within CoCom, the British delegation introduced the proposal informally in bilateral discussions with individual member states. Although the ‘no-comment’ procedure was formally applicable to all communist countries, British officials understood it primarily as a device for facilitating exports to China.Footnote 94 The proposal nevertheless encountered resistance within the German Foreign Office, despite its potential benefits for West German dual-use exports.Footnote 95
France likewise benefited from China’s balancing effect on the Soviet Union but approached cooperation as a means of strengthening its own strategic autonomy.Footnote 96 When France sought to export Franco-German co-produced HOT anti-tank missiles to China, Bonn adopted a posture of tacit non-opposition, refraining from endorsement while distancing itself from the political implications of the transfer.Footnote 97 The Federal Ministry of Defence (Bev) deliberately prevented official contacts between the German co-producer MBB and the Chinese side, arguing that any publicly visible West German involvement in ‘a project formally carried by France alone’ might generate ‘an attribution of political co-responsibility’.Footnote 98 West German authorities thus sought less to halt technological circulation as such than to regulate its political visibility and attribution.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 further sharpened the contrast between China and the Soviet Union. While CoCom tightened its stance towards Moscow through the no-exception policy, China increasingly came to be treated as a special case.Footnote 99 Under Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State Alexander Haig emphasised the strategic importance of US–China relations and signalled to the Chinese government that arms transfers were no longer categorically off the table.Footnote 100 From September 1981, under US leadership, a broad consensus began to emerge among CoCom member states in favour of informally permitting arms exports to China.Footnote 101 West German officials wanted to avoid any impression that they were tilting towards Beijing against Moscow. They therefore maintained a de facto zero-export policy in the military sphere and consistently opposed the formal recognition of preferential status for China within CoCom. At the same time, Bonn supported the US-led informal approach because it preserved room for flexible treatment without changing CoCom’s formal rules.Footnote 102
This informal relaxation of controls soon fed into open commercial competition, intensified by China’s limited foreign-exchange reserves. Britain’s offer of the Harrier fighter jet lost its appeal due to strong US competition and Chinese dissatisfaction with Britain’s high pricing; the deal ultimately failed to materialise.Footnote 103 Instead, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in the field of military avionics in Beijing in 1983, aimed at enhancing China’s defensive capabilities, particularly against Soviet aerial attacks and reconnaissance operations.Footnote 104 Although the United States did not export military aircraft to China in the short term, this positive signal, together with Washington’s persistent advocacy of looser CoCom controls, strengthened the competitive position of US industry. In 1985, China chose McDonnell Douglas as its partner in the civil aviation sector, in large part because it was a leading producer of military aircraft such as the F-15 and F-18. From the Chinese perspective, the close technological integration of civilian and military aircraft production presented an opportunity to strengthen domestic defence capabilities through the import of ostensibly civilian systems, as a Chinese negotiating document at the time makes clear.Footnote 105
During high-level bilateral meetings in the 1980s, Chinese officials also pressed West German delegations to clarify Bonn’s overall stance within CoCom. These inquiries reflected a broader dynamic in which other member states capitalised on West Germany’s cautious approach to secure stronger political backing for their own industries in the Chinese market. The United States, for instance, signalled in Beijing a general willingness to be more accommodating towards Chinese requests while simultaneously shifting responsibility for continued restraint onto its European partners, whom Washington accused of adhering to an excessively restrictive reading of CoCom rules.Footnote 106 France again informed Chinese interlocutors that Bonn would not bypass CoCom restrictions on civil nuclear exports, whereas Paris was prepared to do so, thereby strengthening France’s competitive position.Footnote 107 Bonn, for its part, maintained a unified rhetorical line, declaring that it would ‘not allow itself to be outdone by any of its partners’ in pursuing a more liberal interpretation of the guidelines.Footnote 108
Indeed, the Foreign Office responded positively to the gentlemen’s agreement on flexible application introduced in 1985. In December that year, it concluded an agreement with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Trade on end-use certificates for dual-use goods.Footnote 109 Nonetheless, Bonn continued to adhere to the non-binding principles outlined in 1984, consciously avoiding emphasis on the differential treatment accorded to China by stressing its sovereign prerogative to determine independently which exports might merit more lenient consideration.Footnote 110 Moscow was not persuaded: it quickly denounced the arrangement as preferential treatment for China.Footnote 111
After 1985, CoCom witnessed a failed attempt to institutionalise a more permissive set of rules for arms exports to China. The coordination process revealed that member states increasingly used their positions on China to promote their own commercial interests. The effort began with an Italian proposal submitted after Italy signed a defence-cooperation agreement with China in April 1985.Footnote 112 The proposal advocated such a broad relaxation of arms export controls to China that even the Italian delegation itself described the initiative as provocative.Footnote 113 It was rejected at an initial special meeting in October 1985. Italy then submitted a revised version, but the United States unexpectedly adopted a more restrictive stance at a second special session in April 1986.Footnote 114 By the third meeting in October that year, Washington formally rejected any comprehensive easing of arms exports to China, resulting only in a reaffirmation of the earlier understanding to grant informal ‘favourable consideration’.Footnote 115 The resumption of US–Soviet dialogue in Geneva and Reykjavík, suspended since 1983, partly explains this shift. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and détente policies inspired renewed optimism in the West, diminishing China’s strategic significance within the context of great power relations.
Beyond these security-political considerations, economic interests also played a significant role. By October 1986, the CoCom procedure for US exports of military aircraft technology to China had been completed, giving Washington little incentive to extend comparable opportunities to other member states. Its more restrictive stance after 1986 did not indicate a withdrawal from its cooperative policy towards China; on the contrary, the United States continued to submit more export applications than any other country.Footnote 116 The BMVg noted that Washington deliberately leveraged its dominant position within CoCom to promote its own exports while simultaneously obstructing those of other countries.Footnote 117 The issue was not liberalisation as such, but selective advantage.
At the fourth CoCom special meeting in 1987, the national interests of member states became increasingly pronounced, with their respective commercial priorities shaping the course of negotiations. France, mindful of the specifications of its own MILAN and HOT 1 & 2 production lines, proposed limiting the liberalisation of anti-tank missile exports to systems with a warhead diameter of no more than 150 millimetres and a range of up to 4 kilometres. This would have effectively excluded certain variants of the US-produced TOW 2 and TOW improved systems, prompting firm opposition from the US delegation, supported by Britain. In the domain of large-calibre weapons, Britain and West Germany jointly blocked France’s attempts to liberalise exports of self-loading howitzers. A similar lack of consensus emerged over the technical parameters for light military helicopters, with conflicting commercial interests once again preventing agreement. As a result, export decisions continued to require case-by-case coordination among individual member states, bringing negotiations on the liberalisation of restrictions towards China to a standstill.Footnote 118
The Silkworm incident mentioned at the outset of the article further undermined efforts to institutionalise preferential arms-export arrangements for China. This interruption opened space for Bonn to reassert the logic of détente. When discussions on liberalising the industrial list for China resumed in 1988, Bonn argued that the already established ‘China Green Line’, together with the availability of controlled technologies from non-CoCom countries such as neutral countries and newly industrialised countries, should serve as the basis for relaxing controls on the Soviet-led socialist bloc at an equivalent level.Footnote 119 In bilateral German–US consultations within CoCom, Bonn stressed: ‘It does not make sense to strongly advocate the freer movement of peoples and ideas within the framework of the CSCE process, while at the same time trying to forestall any East–West transfer of technology.’Footnote 120 As an advocate of easing controls towards Eastern Europe, the preferential treatment accorded to China in the 1980s became, in the years preceding the Soviet Union’s collapse, a useful instrument through which Bonn promoted broader relaxation of East–West technology restrictions.
CoCom as a negotiated space of transit: The MBB case
The West German satellite-communications sector offers a case study of how CoCom’s regulatory architecture functioned less as a fixed barrier than as a space of competitive negotiation that generated new pathways of technological circulation. Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB), discussed above as a major West German aerospace and defence company headquartered in Ottobrunn near Munich, brings this paradox into sharp relief. With a product portfolio that carried pronounced dual-use potential, the company repeatedly operated at the intersection of commercial opportunity and CoCom oversight.
MBB first came to the attention of Chinese officials through its serially produced BO-105 helicopter. In 1974, the Chinese ambassador in Bonn visited MBB’s production facilities.Footnote 121 The following year, China’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade, Chai Shufan, toured the company’s Ottobrunn site and expressed interest in future technological cooperation. In the same year, MBB board member Sepp Hort expanded these contacts at the first West German industrial exhibition in Beijing, where he signalled MBB’s interest in joint development projects in the field of reconnaissance satellites.Footnote 122
These early efforts, however, did not translate smoothly into concrete cooperation. In 1977, initial plans for China to purchase a payload test rig from MBB and AEG were abandoned because of unfavourable domestic political conditions, foreign-currency shortages, and CoCom export restrictions.Footnote 123 In 1978, MBB again lost out to US competitors when China moved towards defining a preliminary concept for a communications satellite system. Chinese negotiators insisted on integrating domestically produced subsystems for broadcast satellites, whereas MBB’s proposal relied almost entirely on its own components.Footnote 124
As Britain, France, and the United States gradually adopted a more permissive stance towards China within the CoCom framework, Bonn also began to support German industry’s entry into the emerging Chinese communications market. This support was most evident in the ambiguous dual-use domain, where civilian and military applications were difficult to disentangle and where authorities retained interpretive discretion. Yet these initiatives also provoked criticism over the risks associated with dual-use transfers.
Within this contested setting, the German Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) provided both symbolic and material support for Sino-German cooperation, ranging from test transmissions using the Franco-German Symphonie satellite to the provision of the Sikom network-planning software.Footnote 125 In 1978, BMFT minister Volker Hauff visited China and defined German industrial participation in the construction of a Chinese communications satellite system as a priority objective.Footnote 126 The visit resulted in a protocol that formalised cooperation in aeronautical research and satellite technology and placed MBB’s negotiations under the political auspices of the BMFT.Footnote 127 At the same time, the ministry remained wary of MBB’s independent initiatives because of the company’s involvement in military production. When MBB sought to bring a framework agreement to China in February 1979, the BMFT informed the company that it would support only non-military projects. It also instructed MBB not to conclude any binding agreements until after planned official exchanges between the DFVLR, the predecessor of today’s German Aerospace Centre, and the Chinese Electronics Corporation had taken place.Footnote 128 The instruction reflected the ministry’s efforts to keep corporate initiatives within a politically manageable framework.
Nevertheless, MBB proceeded with the visit, reflecting not merely corporate initiative but also a longer pattern of Bavarian political self-assertion vis-à-vis Bonn.Footnote 129 The delegation included MBB supervisory board chairman and Bavarian finance minister Max Streibl. Prior to departure, the delegation assured the relevant authorities, including the BMVg, that discussions would be limited strictly to television satellite projects.Footnote 130 The outcome was a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST). Under this agreement, Chinese specialists were to participate in the Franco-German TV-SAT programme to acquire knowledge of satellite design and construction, while MBB experts would assist in the development of Chinese television satellites.Footnote 131
These developments prompted intervention by the German Foreign Office. The trigger was a cooperation protocol signed by the DFVLR one month after MBB’s visit. Its title referred to collaboration ‘in the field of general and civil aeronautical research’. The Foreign Office feared that the term ‘general’ could leave room for military interpretation and therefore demanded its removal.Footnote 132 Reports from the German embassy in Beijing further indicated that Chinese counterparts were attempting to extend cooperation in aeronautical research into areas with military relevance. In response, the Foreign Office insisted that future cooperation exclude any military components and that German scientists refrain from participating in projects with potential military relevance.Footnote 133 Companies and research institutions involved were required to coordinate all travel to China with the BMFT. The content of presentations delivered in China was also subject to close scrutiny in consultation with the BMVg.Footnote 134
When China announced the launch of a nationwide television broadcasting satellite system (CBSS) in 1983, MBB acted swiftly and was the first company to submit a proposal.Footnote 135 Drawing on the lessons of 1979, it took the lead in forming the Eurosatellite consortium together with AEG-Telefunken, France’s Aérospatiale and Thomson-CSF, and Belgium’s ETCA.Footnote 136 Earlier interactions had shown that Chinese officials were interested in satellite solutions framed at a European rather than a purely national level. In 1979, German representatives had already explained that a pan-European television satellite was unlikely to be realised. Yet Chinese interest in that earlier European H-Sat concept persisted.Footnote 137 MBB drew on this earlier preference when organising the Eurosatellite consortium in 1983. In its first configuration, the consortium assigned approximately 75 per cent of the production share to German companies.Footnote 138 After Thomson’s subsequent withdrawal from the consortium, however, MBB reorganised its competitive strategy by forming a trilateral German–US–French consortium with Ford Aerospace and Aérospatiale.Footnote 139 Under the proposal, MBB and Aérospatiale would supply the satellite platform, while Ford would provide the communications payload, with national shares of roughly 40% for West Germany, 40% for the United States, and 20% for France.Footnote 140 The principal competitors were the US company RCA and a French consortium led by Thomson-CSF and Matra.Footnote 141
Once again, US political leverage proved decisive. Although BMFT signed a new bilateral agreement on civilian space technology in March 1984, initially improving MBB’s position, this advantage eroded within a year and left RCA as the sole remaining competitor.Footnote 142 MBB sought to justify its higher prices by emphasising superior hardware quality and extensive technology transfer. When West Germany applied for CoCom approval, however, it encountered resistance from the US delegation. Approval was granted in 1985, but only subject to seventeen conditions covering almost all technological elements that might have given MBB a competitive advantage. These restrictions ultimately rendered MBB’s bid non-viable.Footnote 143 The German government and MBB appealed the decision, arguing that the technologies involved were obsolete and intended solely for civilian use.Footnote 144 In March 1986, CoCom agreed to lift restrictions on heat-pipe technology but maintained most of the remaining conditions.Footnote 145
According to a report by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, China ultimately abandoned the original request-for-proposals process for a high-power Ku-band system. Neither the MBB nor the RCA proposal was adopted as an integrated solution. The bidding process nevertheless facilitated substantial informal technology transfer.Footnote 146 Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit to China in 1987 produced only limited results. MBB signed a contract under which its role was confined to the delivery of three subsystems valued only one-tenth of the volume envisaged in the 1984 bid.Footnote 147 Even so, German industry regarded the agreement as an important foothold in the prospective Chinese market.Footnote 148 The French company Matra, which had been eliminated earlier in the bidding process, later secured a contract for a data-processing centre. Although formally embedded within the CoCom approval framework and restricted to ground-based systems, the transaction nonetheless contributed to China’s incremental capacity building in satellite operations.Footnote 149
The MBB case reveals a further spatial dimension: sustained engagement with Chinese partners was accompanied by continuous efforts to mobilise political support at multiple levels within West Germany. This support extended beyond the federal government to the Bavarian state leadership. In addition to Finance Minister Max Streibl, who accompanied the 1979 delegation, Minister-President Franz Josef Strauß provided substantial backing for MBB’s China business.Footnote 150 Parallel initiatives, such as the exhibition in China of the BO-105 CB/PAH combat helicopter after the removal of CoCom-sensitive components, as well as cooperation on small regional aircraft, helped create favourable conditions for securing smaller satellite-related contracts. The intersection of political and economic space, and of civilian and military domains, thus became visible within CoCom as a zone of transit. In the telecommunications sector, CoCom functioned not as a static obstacle but as a contested channel, in which internal competition eroded security rationales and interactions among companies, state agencies, and controlled states generated connections that exceeded the formal logic of embargo. The MBB case therefore reinforces the central argument of this article: mechanisms designed to preserve technological separation, through their internal frictions, became critical sites in the making of global patterns of technological circulation.
Conclusions
Building on recent debates emphasising that global history and national history are not rivals but mutually entangled, this article has shown how a putatively global mechanism of regulation was persistently reshaped, and in important respects distorted, by the specific temporalities and spatial priorities of nation-states.Footnote 151 CoCom, conceived in the age of Cold War globalisation as an instrument designed to produce disconnection, repeatedly generated new forms of connection that undermined its own logic.
In the 1950s, the China embargo was intended to erect a firm barrier separating China from Western goods and technologies. Yet this barrier was continually circumvented via East Berlin, other East European countries, and even member states of the embargo regime itself. These practices enabled restricted goods to reach China and, in the process, created unanticipated commercial, technological, and political linkages that exceeded the regime’s formal design.
By the 1980s, CoCom’s China policy was reshaped less by a coherent security logic than by shifting geopolitical interests and enduring economic competition among member states. West Germany’s acute sensitivity to East German and Soviet security concerns was never fully shared by other CoCom members. Although the preferential space accorded to China also reduced certain control constraints on West German companies, in practice it intensified competitive pressures and often placed them at a disadvantage in the scramble for Chinese orders. Bonn thus found itself navigating a dual imperative: promoting civilian industrial engagement with China while simultaneously managing political and security risks in sensitive technological domains. As optimism surrounding Soviet reform grew, the preferential treatment extended to China became an argument for relaxing East–West controls more broadly, further eroding CoCom’s foundational commitment to technological disconnection.
As export controls are once again being reinforced in response to geopolitical realignment, policy experts have returned to earlier multilateral coordination mechanisms in search of historical lessons. These discussions tend to focus on institutional design and on the need for export control frameworks that are politically defensible, economically sustainable, and capable of uniting Western countries.Footnote 152 This article suggests that such assessments should also attend to the connections that the regime actively produced, often in unintended ways. While CoCom succeeded, during periods of pronounced technological asymmetry, in delaying access to advanced technology and increasing the costs of acquisition for controlled states, security-driven regimes of regulation could slow circulation but never fully sever it. The history of CoCom thus underscores a broader point: mechanisms intended to enforce disconnection were continually transformed by the very connections they sought to contain.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kiran Klaus Patel and David Grillenberger for conversations on related topics during the early stages of this article’s development, and to Máté Rigó for his suggestions. I owe special thanks to Julia Lange for reading several drafts and offering many helpful comments. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Lili Li is a researcher at the Chair of Modern History, University of Munich. She holds a DPhil. in History. Her research focuses on transnational history, Cold War history, and the history of globalisation and deglobalisation.
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