Jiang Zemin in Romania: On the Eve of China's Opening
How a puzzling aid mission to a Warsaw Pact country demonstrated the instincts of a future leader
Today is the 100th anniversary of Jiang’s birth. Beginning on August 11, China Central Television (CCTV) launched an archival documentary series on the life of Jiang Zemin, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. While the documentary released many new details and stories about Jiang’s life, it neglected most of his experience abroad while he worked in the First Ministry of Machine Building (第一机械化工业部). Such a cursory treatment may stem from the scarcity of available sources or from concerns related to foreign relations. Nonetheless, Jiang’s work in Romania in fact reflected his excellence in analyzing international relations, his management skills, and his economic vision, which greatly helped China move forward when he later led the country. As a Cold War scholar who focuses on China and Southeast Europe, I would like to share his stories in Romania.
A Mission That “Did Not Make Sense”
In early 1971, Jiang Zemin was a forty-four-year-old engineer who had recently left the Wuhan Institute of Thermal Machinery and joined the First Ministry of Machine Building as deputy director of its Foreign Affairs Office. He had worked in the automobile and electrical industries, studied factory production in the Soviet Union, and traveled with technical delegations to France and Japan. This combination of engineering and foreign experience made him a natural candidate when the ministry needed a leader for an industrial survey mission to Romania.
The assignment was unusual. Besides Albania, China had never provided a systematic aid program to a Warsaw Pact country (Albania quit the Warsaw Pact in 1968). However, in 1971, China had agreed to help Romania build facilities for automobile molds, bare copper wire, hydraulic and pneumatic components, electrical equipment, and measuring instruments. To launch the investigation and aid program, the Ministry gathered fifty-one specialists from factories and design institutes across China. Thus, Jiang was selected as the leader of this specialist group. Before departure, Jiang required each group to investigate comparable plants at home, collect technical materials, and prepare a preliminary design.
Jiang arrived in Bucharest on July 28, 1971, with the six members of the automobile-mold group. Other teams followed in August and September. For most of the specialists, this was their first trip abroad. What they saw immediately put the purpose of the mission into question.
During the early 1970s, China’s economy was stagnating. Food and consumer goods remained scarce. However, in the eyes of Jiang’s team, Romania appeared much wealthier. The visitors saw new apartment buildings; many Romanians had private automobiles, televisions, and refrigerators. Its factories were also more modern than they had expected. Many operated machinery imported from West Germany, Italy, Britain, and the United States.
Some team members began to describe the mission as “the poor helping the rich” and “the technologically backward helping the advanced.” Their concern came directly from the factories and streets around them. If Romania already possessed Western machinery that China could not manufacture, what exactly was a Chinese aid team doing there?
Jiang understood that the team could hardly continue its work until this question had a convincing answer. After doing observation and analysis, he told team members that China was passing through an extraordinary diplomatic period. He said, “After years of isolation, the country needed an opening in Europe. Romania occupied a valuable position inside the Warsaw Pact: it resisted Soviet control, maintained relations with Western countries, and had begun to build an economy less dependent on Moscow. Cooperation with Romania could therefore serve a purpose far beyond the factories under negotiation.”
For a mid-level official in the machine-building bureaucracy, Jiang’s reasoning was remarkable because it rested on observation rather than privileged information. He had no access to the secret exchanges taking place among senior Chinese, Romanian, and American leaders. He could only work from the contradiction before him: China was sending industrial assistance to a country that appeared more prosperous and technologically advanced. Rather than conclude that the mission was misguided, Jiang treated this contradiction as a clue. If the assignment made little sense as conventional foreign aid, Beijing must have valued cooperation with Romania for a broader strategic purpose.
Events at the diplomatic level confirmed his inference. China was seeking a way out of its international isolation, while Romania was quietly helping Beijing and Washington explore the possibility of improved relations. Jiang had therefore discerned a larger diplomatic shift from the limited evidence available to him. More importantly, he turned that insight into an effective response to the team’s doubts. By explaining how their assignment could contribute to China’s wider opening, he gave the specialists a reason to view Romania’s relative prosperity as an opportunity rather than a reason to question the mission. Complaints about “the poor helping the rich” subsided, allowing the team to concentrate on its work. The episode demonstrated not only Jiang’s ability to recognize the broader significance of an unfamiliar assignment, but also his capacity to restore confidence and unite a team around a shared purpose.
Challenge the Existing Aid Model
The next problem arose from Romania’s understanding of aid. Since Chinese construction aid was usually sent to countries that had little industrial capacity, Chinese teams were accustomed to designing and equipping a complete factory or production line. Romania instead asked China to provide only the workshop, production line, or individual machine that suited a particular project. It would combine that contribution with its own factories, products, drawings, and industrial equipment. Chinese participants called this “ordering from the menu” (点菜). The ministry history describes it as a new form of Chinese aid, and it was the first time the delegation had to turn such a selective request into a workable plan.
The electrical measuring-instrument project at Timișoara offers a clear example. Romania planned a new plant that would combine precision meters, multimeters, and switchboard frequency meters in the Chinese-supported part with older Romanian products transferred from a Bucharest factory. Some equipment would be made in Romania, some had already been imported by Romania, and some would come through Chinese aid. The Chinese contribution was therefore one part of a production system Romania was assembling for itself.
This arrangement differed sharply from the complete factory the Chinese team had expected to design. Romania changed the product list and output targets, and several items were to be made from Romanian drawings, including products Chinese factories had not previously manufactured. The team had to determine whether Chinese processes and equipment could produce each item and what machinery, tooling, and technical responsibility China could safely undertake. It could no longer begin with a Chinese factory design and reproduce it abroad.
Jiang asked the team to evaluate each request according to China’s actual industrial capacity. He reported the departures from the original agreement to the Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and sought instructions. The direction he then conveyed did not force Romania back to a complete Chinese package. Where Romania supplied drawings, the team would first examine whether Chinese processes and equipment could make the product. If they could, China could undertake the process design and provide the equipment and tooling within its capacity. If they could not, the product would not enter China’s commitment.
The flexibility that Jiang proposed seems normal nowadays. However, it took some courage in the 1970s. The great influence of the ultra-left ideology and the “Gang of Four” hindered any change in work procedure. Jiang’s new proposal, which indicated that Chinese design and implementation of aid programs needed to compromise with Western technology, was a great violation of ultra-left ideology. The idea initially met with considerable skepticism. Jiang nevertheless persuaded Fang Yi, the minister responsible for China’s foreign economic relations, to approve this new approach. Fang later recalled that Jiang had faced considerable difficulty in convincing him because China had long followed a fixed procedure in foreign-aid construction. Jiang succeeded because his proposal rested on thorough investigation and a clear sense of responsibility. Jiang’s innovative idea demonstrated that he was willing to challenge current practices according to new situations.
Learning Western Technology Through Romania
Jiang did not limit his scope to finishing the aid program. Rather, he treated Romania as a unique example to learn about technology importation, which was a taboo during Mao’s era. Romania was a socialist economy with extensive access to Western machinery in the 1970s. Romanian factories often combined locally made equipment with machines imported from several capitalist countries. Chinese engineers could see the imported technology operating inside complete production lines, compare it with equipment used in China, and discuss its strengths with Romanian specialists. Direct access of this kind remained rare in the early 1970s.
Jiang asked his team to approach Romanian engineers with humility and to treat the projects as mutually beneficial technical cooperation. The attitude produced practical results. Romanian specialists allowed Chinese visitors to inspect machinery closely, brought out equipment drawings for them to examine, and provided samples and technical formulas. In the bare copper wire project, these materials helped Chinese factories think about a new series of wire-drawing machines rather than merely copying an entire foreign production line.
The most important follow-up came from a West German high-speed rolling mill at a Romanian wire factory. It operated at forty-five meters per second. China’s only comparable mill, imported from Hungary in the 1950s, reached fifteen to twenty-one meters per second and frequently caused production accidents. Jiang proposed adding the Romanian equipment to the two countries’ scientific and technical cooperation program. In July 1972, a Chinese group returned to study its production process. Jiang also encouraged the group to remain in Bucharest for an international mining-machinery exhibition so that it could examine other recent technologies. After the group returned, the Ministry of Metallurgy and the First Ministry of Machine Building began considering a domestically designed high-speed mill with an annual capacity of about 300,000 tons.
For Jiang, Romania’s technology-import model offered a practical reference. Unlike other Chinese people who considered foreign technology an ideological threat, foreign machinery provided a benchmark and a source of technical knowledge in Jiang’s mind. Organized study could then lead to domestic design and production. Importing technology strengthened self-reliance when Chinese industry treated the equipment as material to be understood and absorbed. The Romanian mission allowed Jiang to apply this idea several years before China began importing Western technology on a much larger scale.
A Window Before China Opened
Jiang’s experience in Romania is worth mentioning, because it showed an approach to leadership that would become increasingly important as China moved towards opening to the world. Faced with an assignment that appeared inconsistent with China’s circumstances, he did not simply defend existing policy or follow established procedures. He examined the situation, identified the larger diplomatic change behind the mission, and adjusted China’s aid practices to conditions that policymakers in Beijing had not anticipated. At the same time, he recognized that engagement with a more technologically advanced country could serve China’s own development. These judgments shared a common premise: established policy should be tested against reality, and foreign relations should ultimately expand China’s capacity to develop itself. These were precisely the abilities required of a leader guiding China through deeper reform and greater engagement with the international economy: reading changes beyond China’s borders, overcoming resistance within the bureaucracy, and turning foreign contact into domestic development.