China's transformation had no ready-made roadmap. One of the paths led through Belgrade

Yet discussions of the “Chinese model” often overlook the question of how China arrived at this point in the first place. In the West, the story has been repeatedly presented as a nearly linear transition: Mao Zedong, along with the economic and ideological chaos stemming from the Cultural Revolution, exits the stage, and Deng Xiaoping steps in with his policy of reform and opening up (gaige kaifang 改革开放). In reality, that path was far more turbulent, marked by course corrections, borrowed ideas, and abandoned inspirations.

One of the most unexpected places Beijing looked to for lessons at the start of its transformation was… Yugoslavia. The choice is striking: a state that China had condemned for twenty years as a symbol of revisionism became, in the second half of the 1970s, a subject of intense interest for Chinese reformers. It is worth tracing how this shift came about and what, precisely, remains of it.

Twenty years of hostility

In 1958, Chen Boda, a leading theorist of the Communist Party of China, declared that while “Judas betrayed a single Jesus, Tito betrayed the entire Yugoslav nation.” This was by no means an isolated remark. At the time, the Chinese press waged a campaign accusing Yugoslavia of modern revisionism and of serving imperialism. Both sides recalled their ambassadors, and inter-party relations were severed for twelve years. The immediate cause was the program adopted at the 7th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which called for the dissolution of both military-political blocs. The deeper reason, however, lay elsewhere.

China entered the 1950s devastated by the Japanese invasion and the civil war against the Kuomintang. The CPC regime was still in its infancy and, consequently, unstable; the Chinese party elite therefore had to prioritise securing support from the Kremlin.

The course of foreign policy was set by the imperative to choose a side, a stance articulated by Mao Zedong in his June 1949 essay “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”: first put domestic affairs in order, and then, while opening up to the world, align firmly with the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia represented the exact opposite of this attitude. Its communists had emerged from the war with their own army and their own myth of partisan victory. This independence led to a conflict with Stalin, culminating in the expulsion of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948. Beijing supported the decision because, in the most critical phase of its own civil war, it could not risk antagonising Moscow. Nevertheless, Belgrade was among the first nations to recognise the People’s Republic of China, doing so as early as October 1949. China did not reciprocate this gesture until January 1955, following the rapprochement between Khrushchev and Tito.

The ferocity of the 1958 attack, therefore, stemmed from an issue that did not directly concern Yugoslavia. When the Sino-Soviet split entered an open phase in the early 1960s, the third of the “Nine Commentaries,” entitled “Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?” dissected the Yugoslav system in order to strike at Khrushchev for tolerating Tito’s “renegade clique.” In this dispute Yugoslavia served as an argument rather than as the intended target.

A turning point came with the 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia. Shared opposition to Moscow allowed ideological rhetoric to subside. In 1970, both states restored full diplomatic relations, though without inter-party ties, as Beijing continued to deny the Yugoslav party any claim to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The highest-ranking visitor was Prime Minister Džemal Bijedić, received by Mao in 1975. The Chairman praised Tito as a man “hard as iron” and fearless in the face of Soviet pressure, turning the Chinese transcription of his name, Tietuo 铁托, into a compliment, as the first character signifies iron. Mao and Zhou Enlai died in 1976, having never met Tito.

August 1977: the first visitor to the mausoleum

Josip Broz Tito landed in Beijing on August 30, 1977, and a few days later became the first foreign head of state to enter Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, even before its official opening to the public. An editorial in the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) portrayed him as a distinguished anti-fascist leader of the older generation, the founder of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and a leader respected by nations worldwide. Notably, it was the first time his titles, Chairman of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and President, were cited side by side. During a conversation on August 31, Hua Guofeng addressed his guest as “Comrade.” The press had not yet used this term; it did not reappear in print until November 12, 1977, during a visit by a Yugoslav trade union delegation led by Milutin Baltić, marking the first time a sitting Yugoslav politician had been addressed this way since 1958.

The magnitude of this shift becomes apparent only when contrasted with how Yugoslavia had been perceived by Chinese readers just two years prior. As the PRC’s diplomatic archives for this period remain closed, the party press serves as the best available indicator of the leadership’s mindset, and Renmin Ribao, the organ of the CPC Central Committee, was required reading for cadres at all levels. The picture that emerges from it may come as a surprise: Yugoslavia was depicted there primarily as a nation of total people’s defence. The newspaper reported on the drive for self-sufficiency in arms production, the planned construction of tunnels, and military exercises, frequently invoking the doctrine of total people’s defence (opštenarodna odbrana). A separate category consisted of reprints of speeches, most often by Tito, frequently appearing in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and by Defence Minister Nikola Ljubičić. Economic matters were covered rarely and dryly. When one of Yugoslavia’s major infrastructure projects at the time, the Belgrade-Bar railway line, was opened, the coverage was limited to a single sentence from a speech by Tito regarding its importance for national defence.

After August 1977, not only did the number of articles about Yugoslavia increase with each week, but their character changed as well. Instead of reprints from the Yugoslav press, original on-the-ground reports began to appear: from the “3. Maj” shipyard in Rijeka in September 1977, and from Energoinvest in Sarajevo in February 1978. A report from the Rade Končar electrical engineering factory in Zagreb, published on November 10, 1977, proved to be a turning point; it marked the first time the official Chinese press described the Yugoslav system of worker self-management, covering the election process for the workers’ council, the scope of its authority, and even the changes introduced by the 1974 Constitution and the Law on Associated Labour. The correspondents did not yet pass judgment on whether the system was right or effective. However, the level of detail in the description spoke for itself. Defence issues did not disappear from the pages of the press, and in January 1978 the same Energoinvest was praised for purchasing eight artillery pieces with its own funds. They ceased, however, to be the focal point of China’s interest in Yugoslavia.

1978: the sequence of events

The decision to rebuild relations between the parties was made by the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee on August 26, 1977, on the eve of Tito’s arrival. However, the decision was limited in scope and technical in nature; Belgrade was not informed of it, and formal contact was not resumed until ten months later. An event occurred during this interim that explains the delay.

In March 1978, a delegation of CPC party officials, including economists who would later spearhead the reforms, travelled to Yugoslavia. The report on this trip, discovered years later in the archives of the small city of Tongliao in Inner Mongolia, is a comprehensive and substantive document, devoid of mere pleasantries. Only after this report, in June 1978, did the CPC Central Committee send a congratulatory telegram to the 11th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, thereby restoring inter-party relations that had been severed twenty years earlier. The Congress received extensive coverage in Beijing: Tito’s speech was reprinted across a full page, and a correspondent described how the hall erupted in applause when Edvard Kardelj read out the Chinese telegram. The sequence of events is significant: the ideological rapprochement followed the experts’ report rather than preceding it, pointing to a decision-making process grounded in factual assessment rather than a solitary gesture by a leader.

Three weeks before Hua Guofeng’s return visit, on August 3, 1978, a Renmin Ribao correspondent moved beyond merely describing workers’ self-management to evaluating it. He posed the question of why the Yugoslav economy was growing so rapidly and why the local workers felt a sense of shared responsibility for their enterprises; he answered by pointing to self-management. Hua arrived in Belgrade on August 21, 1978, almost exactly a year after Tito’s visit, marking only the second foreign trip of his life. Coverage of the visit filled not only the front page but also subsequent pages. An editorial summarising the visit contained the most significant statement of all: that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia had applied the universal truths of Marxism to the specific conditions of its own country. Chinese communists had previously used this formula to describe their own path. Applying it to another nation signified an acknowledgment that the Yugoslav system was genuinely socialist.

All of this took place prior to the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, held in December 1978. Thus, Yugoslavia was not “promoted” in the wake of the reformist breakthrough. Rather, the renewed interest in the Yugoslav experience preceded that breakthrough and partly paved the way for it, providing the leadership with an argument that an economy based on market mechanisms, social ownership, and openness to foreign capital could still be considered socialist. At the time, Chinese leaders were seeking not so much a model to copy as proof that such a path was actually possible.

What exactly was being studied?

Knowledge about Yugoslavia was disseminated in China by economists close to the leadership, most notably Yu Guangyuan, Luo Yuanzheng, and Su Shaozhi. They did so through publications, lectures, and conferences, as well as by establishing institutions; the Society for the Study of the Yugoslav Economy was founded during this period. Papers published between 1978 and 1980 addressed topics such as worker self-management, social ownership, the relationship between market mechanisms and planning, agricultural management, and the balance between capital accumulation and consumption. The level of engagement went far beyond mere reading. Translators and economists learned Serbo-Croatian, study trips were often lengthy and methodical, and the phenomenon reached such an intensity in 1978–1979 that it became known in the literature as “Yugomania”.

It was not only the elite who were learning, however. Internal reports preserved in the Shanghai Municipal Archives reveal that local-level hosts of Yugoslav delegations asked their own highly specific questions: about theatre management, about the organisation of tourism in a competitive environment, and about the funding of agricultural research. Representatives from China’s leather and machinery industries returned with extensive reports comparing Yugoslav practices with Chinese needs. This same hunger for concrete detail was evident in the daily press, for instance in reports describing a Belgrade knitwear factory that had been transformed from a loss-making entity into a profitable one, while explaining to readers that Yugoslav enterprises were managed by workers and that the workers’ council could simply dismiss an incompetent director.

The interest was thus genuine and detailed, yet selective from the very start. The Chinese studied the Yugoslav approach to small-scale private ownership, foreign investment, and enterprise autonomy, but they never adopted the system of worker self-management itself, specifically the practice of the workers’ council appointing and dismissing management. What they borrowed was the concept of enterprise autonomy vis-à-vis the state administration, not the workforce’s control over the enterprise.

The retreat

The high-water mark was the death of Tito on May 4, 1980. Hua Guofeng flew to Belgrade for the funeral, an event that remains the only instance of a top PRC leader attending the funeral of a foreign head of state. Afterward, a drift away began, though it was initially imperceptible in the rhetoric.

The expectations of the two sides diverged. China wanted to continue observing and taking notes, while Yugoslavia increasingly expected trade and investment. The tone of the Chinese delegates also shifted; they moved from the stance of students to declaring an ambition to surpass Yugoslavia’s economic indicators. At the same time, the object of their admiration began to crumble. Mounting foreign debt, inflation, unemployment, and inter-republican and ethnic tensions were already visible; the Chinese press, having overlooked them for three years, could no longer ignore them. In August 1982, an open, critical debate broke out among Chinese economists. Traces of this reassessment are clearly visible in a 1985 text by Lou Jiwei, which bore a straightforward message: learn from Yugoslavia’s experience while avoiding the entrenchment of a division of power among territorial units. Chinese elites, fresh from the Cultural Revolution, were particularly receptive to arguments regarding the risks of power fragmentation.

The legacy of this episode is, therefore, exactly like its course: selective. From the Yugoslav experience, China adopted the conviction that market mechanisms, small-scale private ownership, and foreign capital could coexist within a socialist economy, while also heeding a warning against devolving economic power without retaining central control. They rejected workers’ self-management, the very feature the Yugoslavs themselves considered the essence of their model.

In China’s collective memory, the legacy of those years is defined primarily by the popularity of Yugoslav partisan films, most notably Walter Defends Sarajevo. In official discourse, the narrative of learning from Belgrade was superseded after 1999, following the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, by a narrative centred on a shared experience of grievance. The episode in which Beijing looked to Yugoslavia for lessons faded almost entirely from public consciousness.

China’s transformation lacked a ready-made roadmap. It took shape through the comparison of experiments conducted elsewhere, the assessment of their outcomes, and the selection of elements that could be adapted. One of the paths taken led through Belgrade and ended where the state that provided it met its own demise.

Author: Zofia Maria Żurek