Sino-albanische Freundschaft

[Ein deutscher Jäger]

Ein Vöglein hat mir zugetragen, dass es im Rahmen der chinesisch-albanischen Waffenbrüderschaft einen chinesischen U-Boot-Stützpunkt an der Adria gegeben haben soll. Wer weiss was darüber oder kann Quellen nennen, da ich bisher nichts darüber finden konnte?

[mettwurst]

Servus Bruder Nr. 1,

ich kann mich an eine Dokumentation mit dem Titel "Das Albanien des Enver Hoxha" erinnern, die vor ca. zwei bis drei Jahren mal auf arte lief. Darin wurde erwähnt, dass nach dem Bruch der SVR Albanien mit der UdSSR Anfang der sechziger Jahre die sowjetische Marine ihren einzigen Flottenstützpunkt am Mittelmeer in der südalbanischen Hafenstatdt Vlorë (Vlora) räumen musste. Dieser Stützpunkt soll laut der Dokumentation (und ich betrachte den Sender arte als überaus zuverlässig und seriös) nach der Anlehnung der SVR Albanien an die VR China von chinesischen U-Booten genutzt worden sein. Klingt reichlich skurril und man wird sich zwangsläufig fragen, welchen Nutzen ein Entwicklungsland wie die VR China denn aus einem U-Boot-Stützpunkt an der Adria ziehen kann. Im Internet bin ich auf der Suche nach Quellen, welche die Existenz eines chinesischen Marinestützpunkts in Albanien belegen, jedenfalls noch nicht fündig geworden.

Mit sino-skipetarischen Grüssen

[mettwurst]

Hallo Ein deutscher Jäger formerly known as Bruder Nr. 1!

Sieht leider ganz so aus, als ob chinesische U-Boote in der Adria keine Sau interessieren würden. Wirklich sehr schade ;(

Mit menschlich enttäuschten Grüssen

[mike]

hat zwar nichts mit dem Thema direkt zu tun, aber trotzdem interessant.

[Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]

[Ein deutscher Jäger]

Hallo Mike!

Danke für den Link-Tipp!

Gruß

[mettwurst]

Hallo Ein deutscher Jäger,

wie es scheint, kann oder will niemand etwas über die sino-albanische Waffenbrüderschaft wissen bzw. schreiben. Wer weiss, vielleicht war das ja auch alles bloss ein bürgerlich-imperialistisches Propagandamärchen à la "Wag the Dog", gefilmt in den Studios von Hollywood. Motto: "Es gibt chinesische U-Boote in Albanien. Ich habe sie im Fernsehen gesehen." :2faces:

Mit verkaterten Grüssen

[mettwurst]

Mirëmëngjes (d.h.: Guten Morgen auf Albanisch) EDJ,

damit dieser hochinteressante Thread nicht komplett in der Versenkung verschwindet und in Vergessenheit gerät, habe ich mal wieder ein wenig nach chinesischen U-Booten in der Sozialistischen Volksrepublik Albanien (SVRA) geforscht und bin fündig geworden. Auf einer Interentseite, welche das Thema 'Cool Commies' (siehe: [Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]) behandelt, steht: 'At the height of Russian-Chinese tensions in the mid-'60s, he forged a unilateral alliance with Mao and was rewarded for his efforts with an aging Chinese submarine.' Oh Mann, sag bloss das soll alles gewesen sein, ein rostendes chinesisches U-Boot, dass der Grosse Vorsitzende Mao dem Genossen Enver Hoxha überliess? Keine chinesische Marinebasis? Wie fertig muss die SVRA eigentlich gewesen sein, dass sie auf Almosen aus einem asiatischen Dritte-Welt-Staat angewiesen war?


Aus einem Literatur-Journal der SVRA aus dem Jahre 1979:
I first heard those five dear letters at the dawn of my life
Ever since your name became as dear to me as my
Paternal home
We shout 'Enver!'

Übrigens, dieser Thread behandelt ja die sino-albanische Freundschaft insgesamt. Dazu noch ein skurriles Detail von der oben erwähnten Internetseite: 'Determined to follow the Chairman in all things, he announced that Albania would launch its own Cultural Revolution, which included mandatory Mandarin Chinese lessons for all citizens.' Das hat die SVRA sicherlich richtig nach vorne gebracht

Mit maoistisch-hoxhaistischen Grüssen

[mettwurst]

Hallo EDJ,

die SVRA muss wirklich komplett im A**** gewesen sein! 1974 liessen die Albaner sich von der VR China ein Stahlwerk mit dem Namen "Stahl der Partei" vor den Toren der Stadt Elbasan aus dem Boden stampfen.

Quellen:
- [Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]
- [Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]

Übrigens, wusstest du, dass die Wasserkraftwerke in der SVRA als "Licht der Partei" bezeichnet wurden?

Anschliessend noch eine erfrischende Wahrheit aus der Feder des Genossen Enver Hoxha: 'Im Falle der Solidarnosc wird die Arbeiterklasse von der katholischen Kirche, der polnischen Reaktion und der Weltreaktion manipuliert und geleitet, die dafür kämpfen, auf einem Weg voll Gefahren und tragischer Überraschungen ein anderes revisionistisches, kapitalistisches System zu errichten.'

Da muss ich dem Onkel Enver aber mal beipflichten. Da hat er völlig Recht. Nur, wo ist das Problem dabei?

Mit sino-skipetarischen Grüssen

[Gregor Samsa]

die SVRA muss wirklich komplett im A**** gewesen sein! 1974 liessen die Albaner sich von der VR China ein Stahlwerk mit dem Namen "Stahl der Partei" vor den Toren der Stadt Elbasan aus dem Boden stampfen.

Albanien war und ist wirtschaftlich und technologisch rückständig. Auch wenn es in Europa liegt darf es mit Fug und Recht als Entwicklungsland angesehen werden. Hier einige Zitate aus der [Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]:

Social and Economic Conditions after World War I

Extraordinarily undeveloped, the Albania that emerged after World War I was home to something less than a million people divided into three major religious groups and two distinct classes: those people who owned land and claimed semifeudal privileges and those who did not. The landowners had always held the principal ruling posts in the country's central and southern regions, but many of them were steeped in the same Oriental conservatism that brought decay to the Ottoman Empire. The landowning elite expected that they would continue to enjoy precedence. The country's peasants, however, were beginning to dispute the landed aristocracy's control. Muslims made up the majority of the landowning class as well as most of the pool of Ottoman-trained administrators and officials. Thus Muslims filled most of the country's administrative posts.

In northern Albania, the government directly controlled only Shkodër and its environs. The highland clans were suspicious of a constitutional government legislating in the interests of the country as a whole, and the Roman Catholic Church became the principal link between Tiranë and the tribesmen. In many instances, administrative communications were addressed to priests for circulation among their parishioners.

Poor and remote, Albania remained decades behind the other Balkan countries in educational and social development. Illiteracy plagued almost the entire population. About 90 percent of the country's peasants practiced subsistence agriculture, using ancient methods and tods, such as wooden plows. Much of the country's richest farmland lay under water in malaria-infested coastal marshlands. Albania lacked a banking system, a railroad, a modern port, an efficient military, a university, or a modern press. The Albanians had Europe's highest birthrate and infant mortality rate, and life expectancy for men was about thirtyeight years. The American Red Cross opened schools and hospitals at Durrës and Tiranë, and one Red Cross worker founded an Albanian chapter of the Boy Scouts that all boys between twelve and eighteen years old were subsequently required to join by law. Although hundreds of schools opened across the country, in 1938 only 36 percent of all Albanian children of school age were receiving education of any kind.

Despite the meager educational opportunities, literature flourished in Albania between the two world wars. A Franciscan priest, Gjergj Fishta, Albania's greatest poet, dominated the literary scene with his poems on the Albanians' perseverance during their quest for freedom.

Independence also brought changes to religious life in Albania. The ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople recognized the autocephaly of the Albanian Orthodox Church after a meeting of the country's Albanian Orthodox congregations in Berat in August 1922. The most energetic reformers in Albania came from the Orthodox population who wanted to see Albania move quickly away from its Muslim, Turkish past, during which Christians made up the underclass. Albania's conservative Sunni Muslim community broke its last ties with Constantinople in 1923, formally declaring that there had been no caliph (see Glossary) since the Prophet Muhammad himself and that Muslim Albanians pledged primary allegiance to their native country. The Muslims also banned polygamy and allowed women to choose whether or not to wear a veil.

Data as of April 1992

The Precommunist Albanian Economy

The Albanians faced daunting developmental challenges when they declared independence in 1912 after some 500 years as part of the Ottoman Empire. Their medieval, patriarchal social structure necessarily stunted the growth of anything beyond the most rudimentary economic relationships. Subsistence and feudal agriculture so dominated Albania's economy in the state's early years that even trained carpenters, joiners, and blacksmiths were in short supply. Each family generally produced its own bread and meat as well as flax, wool, and leather. Many peasants used wooden plows and knew little about manures, artificial fertilizers, or crop rotation; most had no incentive to produce cash crops because they had no way to transport their output to a reliable market. A complete absence of good roads made interregional commerce almost impossible. The trip from Tiranë to Vlorë, for example, involved a sea journey; and although Shkodër's tradesmen exported skins by boat to Italy, their compatriots in Gjirokastër had to cross the Strait of Otranto to buy them from the Italians (see fig. 1). There were also no roads across the Greek or Yugoslav borders capable of handling commercial traffic.

Albania's leaders lacked accurate data on the country's agricultural output, as well as on the extent and characteristics of its farmland, livestock herds, and oil and mineral deposits. President Ahmed Zogu (later king Zog) sought Italian protection for Albania 1925, entering into economic agreements that Italy used to exploit Albania's oil, chromite, copper, and iron-ore reserves. Albania remained backward, however. In the late 1920s, agriculture contributed over 90 percent of the national income although only 8 percent of the country's land area was under cultivation and the entire farm sector could boast only thirtytwo tractors (see Table 3, Appendix). Even in 1938, Albania's industrial output amounted to less than 4 percent of national income, and annual per capita industrial production totaled about US$8. However, Italy did carry out extensive geological exploration, gauging for the first time the extent of Albania's mineral wealth. The Italians also improved Albania's infrastructure, modernizing Tiranë and constructing 1,500 kilometers of roads and several hundred bridges as well as Durrës harbor. World War II dealt Albania's economy severe setbacks except in the mining sector, where the mineral-hungry Italian and German occupying forces actually added to productive capacity. Durrës harbor and many of the country's roads and bridges, however, sustained damage during the war.

Data as of April 1992

Hier noch speziell etwas zu den sino-albanischen Beziehungen unter dem kommunistischen Regime:

Albania and China

Albania played a role in the Sino-Soviet conflict far outweighing either its size or its importance in the communist world. By 1958 Albania stood with China in opposing Moscow on issues of peaceful coexistence, de-Stalinization, and Yugoslavia's "separate road to socialism" through decentralization of economic life. The Soviet Union, other East European countries, and China all offered Albania large amounts of aid. Soviet leaders also promised to build a large Palace of Culture in Tiranë as a symbol of the Soviet people's "love and friendship" for the Albanians. But despite these gestures, Tiranë was dissatisfied with Moscow's economic policy toward Albania. Hoxha and Shehu apparently decided in May or June 1960 that Albania was assured of Chinese support, and they openly sided with China when sharp polemics erupted between China and the Soviet Union. Ramiz Alia, at the time a candidate-member of the Politburo and Hoxha's adviser on ideological questions, played a prominent role in the rhetorical.

The Sino-Soviet split burst into the open in June 1960 at a Romanian Workers' Party congress, at which Khrushchev attempted to secure condemnation of Beijing. Albania's delegation, alone among the European delegations, supported the Chinese. The Soviet Union immediately retaliated by organizing a campaign to oust Hoxha and Shehu in the summer of 1960. Moscow cut promised grain deliveries to Albania during a drought, and the Soviet embassy in Tiranë overtly encouraged a pro-Soviet faction in the APL to speak out against the party's pro-Chinese stand. Moscow also apparently involved itself in a plot within the APL to unseat Hoxha and Shehu by force. But given their tight control of the party machinery, army, and Shehu's secret police, the Directorate of State Security (Drejtorija e Siguimit te Shtetit--Sigurimi), the two Albanian leaders easily parried the threat. Five pro-Soviet Albanian leaders were eventually tried and executed. China immediately began making up for the cancellation of Soviet wheat shipments despite a paucity of foreign currency and its own economic hardships.

Albania again sided with China when it launched an attack on the Soviet Union's leadership of the international communist movement at the November 1960 Moscow conference of the world's eighty-one communist parties. Hoxha inveighed against Khrushchev for encouraging Greek claims to southern Albania, sowing discord within the APL and army, and using economic blackmail. "Soviet rats were able to eat while the Albanian people were dying of hunger," Hoxha railed, referring to purposely delayed Soviet grain deliveries. Communist leaders loyal to Moscow described Hoxha's performance as "gangsterish" and "infantile," and the speech extinguished any chance of an agreement between Moscow and Tiranë. For the next year, Albania played proxy for China. Pro-Soviet communist parties, reluctant to confront China directly, criticized Beijing by castigating Albania. China, for its part, frequently gave prominence to the Albanians' fulminations against the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, which Tiranë referred to as a "socialist hell."

Hoxha and Shehu continued their harangue against the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia at the APL's Fourth Party Congress in February 1961. During the congress, the Albanian government announced the broad outlines of the country's Third Five-Year Plan (1961-65), which allocated 54 percent of all investment to industry, thereby rejecting Khrushchev's wish to make Albania primarily an agricultural producer. Moscow responded by canceling aid programs and lines of credit for Albania, but the Chinese again came to the rescue.

After additional sharp exchanges between Soviet and Chinese delegates over Albania at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev lambasted the Albanians for executing a pregnant, pro-Soviet member of the Albanian party Politburo, and the Soviet Union finally broke diplomatic relations with Albania in December. Moscow then withdrew all Soviet economic advisers and technicians from the country, including those at work on the Palace of Culture, and halted shipments of supplies and spare parts for equipment already in place in Albania. In addition, the Soviet Union continued to dismantle its naval installations on Sazan Island, a process that had begun even before the break in relations.

China again compensated Albania for the loss of Soviet economic support, supplying about 90 percent of the parts, foodstuffs, and other goods the Soviet Union had promised. Beijing lent the Albanians money on more favorable terms than Moscow, and, unlike Soviet advisers, Chinese technicians earned the same low pay as Albanian workers and lived in similar housing. China also presented Albania with a powerful radio transmission station from which Tiranë sang the praises of Stalin, Hoxha, and Mao Zedong for decades. For its part, Albania offered China a beachhead in Europe and acted as China's chief spokesman at the UN. To Albania's dismay, however, Chinese equipment and technicians were not nearly so sophisticated as the Soviet goods and advisers they replaced. Ironically, a language barrier even forced the Chinese and Albanian technicians to communicate in Russian. Albanians no longer took part in Warsaw Pact activities or Comecon agreements. The other East European communist nations, however, did not break diplomatic or trade links with Albania. In 1964 the Albanians went so far as to seize the empty Soviet embassy in Tiranë, and Albanian workers pressed on with construction of the Palace of Culture on their own.

The shift away from the Soviet Union wreaked havoc on Albania's economy. Half of its imports and exports had been geared toward Soviet suppliers and markets, so the souring of Tiranë's relations with Moscow brought Albania's foreign trade to near collapse as China proved incapable of delivering promised machinery and equipment on time. The low productivity, flawed planning, poor workmanship, and inefficient management at Albanian enterprises became clear when Soviet and East European aid and advisers were withdrawn. In 1962 the Albanian government introduced an austerity program, appealing to the people to conserve resources, cut production costs, and abandon unnecessary investment.

In October 1964, Hoxha hailed Khrushchev's fall from power, and the Soviet Union's new leaders made overtures to Tiranë. It soon became clear, however, that the new Soviet leadership had no intention of changing basic policies to suit Albania, and relations failed to improve. Tiranë's propaganda continued for decades to refer to Soviet officials as "treacherous revisionists" and "traitors to communism," and in 1964 Hoxha said that Albania's terms for reconciliation were a Soviet apology to Albania and reparations for damages inflicted on the country. Soviet-Albanian relations dipped to new lows after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Albania responded by officially withdrawing from the alliance.

Data as of April 1992

Und noch etwas zur wirtschaftlichen Abhängigkeit Albaniens von China:

Dependence on China, 1961-78

The Albanian leadership's fixation on heavy industry contributed significantly to its decision to break with the Soviet Union. Enver Hoxha gambled that China not only would be less likely than the Soviet Union to threaten his ascendancy but also would be more likely to provide investment money and equipment for his pet industrial projects. Albania's Third Five-Year Plan (1961-65) amounted to outright defiance of Soviet advice to concentrate mainly on agriculture. The plan allocated industry 54 percent of all investment and called for a 52-percent rise in overall industrial production, including increases of 54 percent and 50 percent in the output of producer and consumer goods, respectively. Moscow responded by canceling credits. The Albanian leaders foresaw that a cut in Soviet investment and aid would disrupt their economy but calculated that maintaining power and continuing industrialization would outweigh the failure of one five-year plan. The Soviet aid stoppage brought Albania's foreign trade to a near halt and delayed completion of major construction projects. Spare-parts shortages led to a 12.5-percent decline in labor productivity between 1960 and 1963. China compensated Albania for the loss of Soviet credits and supplied about 90 percent of the spare parts, foodstuffs, and other goods Moscow had promised. The Chinese, however, proved unable to deliver promised machinery and equipment on time.

In 1962 the Albanian government introduced an austerity program to keep the country's sputtering economy from stalling entirely. Official public appeals to cut costs and conserve resources and equipment netted a claimed 6 percent savings. The government also initiated a campaign of "popular consultation," asking individuals to submit suggestions for improving self-sufficiency. Years of state terror and still-rigid central control, however, had undermined the Albanians' willingness to assume personal responsibility. Party hard-liners, fearing they would lose their positions to a younger generation of more technically sophisticated managers, sabotaged cost-cutting measures.

The government launched a program to increase the amount and quality of arable land by terracing hillsides and draining swamps. A new phase of collectivization was initiated. However, agricultural output grew only 22 percent over the entire five years instead of the planned 72 percent. Overall industrial production grew a mere 14 percent in 1964 and 1965.

Fearful of a potential domestic power struggle and disappointed that heavy industry's output had failed to increase significantly overall between 1950 and 1965, the Albanian regime adjusted its Stalinist economic system in the mid-1960s. The government altered the planning mechanism in February 1966 by allowing for a small degree of worker participation in decision making and reducing by 80 percent the number of indicators in the national economic plan. The leadership also decentralized decision-making power from the Council of Ministers to the ministries and local people's councils and included a slight devolution of control over enterprise investment funds. The system was specifically designed, however, to ensure that resources were allocated in accordance with a central plan. At no time, at least in public, did Albania's rulers entertain the notion--heretical to all orthodox Stalinists--that economic decision making should be devolved to the enterprises.

In March 1966, an "open letter" from the Albanian Party of Labor to the Albanian people heralded radical changes in the egalitarian job allocation and wage regime. The authorities cut 15,000 jobs from the state bureaucracy, replaced executives, and shunted managers and party officials into the countryside. The government then eliminated income taxes and reduced the salaries of highly paid workers. Wages varied by industry, but the ratio between the lowest and highest salaries was only about 1:2.5. Reviving a scheme originally launched in 1958, the government began assigning all employees to perform "productive" physical labor. People engaged in "mental work"--for example, intellectuals, teachers, and party and state bureaucrats--were required to toil in the fields for one month each year. Even high-school students took part in "voluntary" construction and agricultural work. Only the party elite remained unaffected by the egalitarian reforms.

In emulation of China's Cultural Revolution, which was designed to rekindle the revolutionary fervor of the masses, Hoxha prescribed a regular rotation of managers to prevent "bureaucratic stagnation," "bureaucratism," "intellectualism," "technocratism," and a whole neologistic lexicon of other "negative tendencies." The campaign, called the Cultural and Ideological Revolution, also prescribed the replacement of men with women in the party and state administrations.

The government's economic adjustments militated against efficiency. Workers, who were given a voice in planning, lobbied for the easiest possible production targets and worked to overfulfill them in order to earn bonuses. But because one year's output figures became the basis for the next year's targets, they tried to limit overfulfillment to prevent the imposition of difficult targets in the next planning period. The government's campaign to send office workers out to the fields, mines, and factories encountered resistance. The policies of guaranteed full employment and extensive growth--expanding productive capacity rather than squeezing more from existing capacity--made huge numbers of workers redundant. The low quality and quantity of consumer goods and virtually flat income-distribution curve dampened incentive. Workers dealt in pilfered state property and rested at their official jobs in order to moonlight illegally. Although the government had herded all artisans into cooperatives by 1959, many craftsmen, including tailors, carpenters, and clothing dealers, earned undeclared income through private work. Black-market construction gangs even performed work at factory sites and collective farms for directors desperate to meet plan targets.

In the late 1960s, thanks mainly to massive capital inflows from China, the Albanian economy expanded. The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1966-70) called for an increase of about 50 percent in overall industrial production, with producer-goods production increasing by 10.8 percent annually and consumer-goods output rising 6.2 percent. Most sectors exceeded plan targets. Heavy industry's share of overall industrial production rose from 26 percent in 1965 to 38.5 percent in 1970, the largest increase registered in any five-year period in Albania's history (see Table 4, Appendix). In 1967 the government launched a "scientific and technical revolution" aimed at improving self-sufficiency. For the first time, the Albanian Party of Labor made a serious attempt to take into account Albania's natural resources and other competitive advantages while planning industrial development. Government officials examined blueprints for coal-fired and hydroelectric power plants as well as plans for expanding the chemical and engineering industries. Despite chronic worker absenteeism, the engineering sector performed remarkably well, tripling output between 1965 and 1973. The late 1960s also saw changes in the agricultural sector. The authorities announced a farm collectivization drive in 1967 and, in an attempt to take advantage of economies of scale, amalgamated smaller collectives into larger state farms in 1967 and 1968. By 1970, Albania's power grid linked all the country's rural areas.

In the early 1970s, Albania's economy entered a tailspin when China reduced aid (see Shifting Alliances, ch. 4). During the period of close ties, the Chinese had given Albania about US$900 million in aid and had provided extensive credits for industrial development. In the mid-1970s, China accounted for about half of Albania's yearly US$200 million in trade turnover. The economic downturn after the aid reduction clearly showed that Albania's Stalinist developmental strategy failed to provide growth when levels of foreign aid were reduced. In the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1971-75), the government called for an increase of about 60 percent in the value of overall industrial production; producergoods production was to increase by about 80 percent and consumer-goods output by about 40 percent. General results from the first two years of the plan were relatively satisfactory. But after China reduced aid to Albania substantially in 1972, many key sectors fell disastrously short of plan targets. Tiranë responded by launching an export drive to the capitalist West a year later. In 1974 the government criticized consumer-goods producers for failing to meet assortment and quality objectives. During the five-year period, overall industrial production rose just over 50 percent; producer-goods output, 57 percent; and consumer-goods output, 45 percent. Despite the obvious link with the curtailment of Chinese aid, the Albanian government offered no official explanation for the economic downturn. Widespread purges were reported in 1974, 1975, and 1976.

Data as of April 1992

Um den Bogen zur aktuellen wirtschaftlichen und politischen Situation Albaniens zu schlagen:
[Links nur für registrierte Nutzer]

[mettwurst]

Të lutem (Alban. für Danke) Gregor Samsa,

für die Bereitstellung der umfangreichen Informationen zur sozio-ökonomischen Entwicklung Albaniens und der Abhängigkeit seiner Wirtschaft von der VR China in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren.

Und nun noch ein bisschen pralle realsozialistische Werbung für proletarischen Internationalismus:



Der Slogan lautet in etwa (da macht sich so ein abgebrocheses Sinologiestudium dann doch noch bezahlt) so: Hoch lebe die immerwährende und unverbrüchliche kämpferische Freundschaft zwischen den Völkern Chinas und Albaniens!

Mit internationalistisch-proletarischen Grüssen