Chinese-Albanian Relations: The End of an Affair?

It is difficult to measure Albania's foreign trade with any precision, but a study of the five-year plan reports together with other sources, both Albanian and non-Albanian, suggests that between 1965 and 1975 the country's trade with China accounted for between 55 per cent. and 65 per cent. of Tirana's total foreign trade.

Before the Second World War, Albania had virtually no heavy industry or railways, and only a few roads were hard-surfaced. Although more than 80 per cent. of the population worked on the land, the country was not even self-sufficient in cereals, and at least four-fifths of the pre-War population were illiterate. For a population of just over 1 million in 1938, there were only 18 secondary schools, 155 registered doctors, 44 dentists, 10 hospitals, five public libraries and no universities. The modest. progress in mining, food processing, and highway construction under the Italian and the German occupations was largely off-set by the loss of able-bodied men, the damage to buildings, bridges and mining installations and the wholesale slaughter of livestock as a result of the War. With its acute shortage of capital, primitive system of cultivation, lack of heavy industrial base and absence of any integrated pattern of communications, Albania had been, if anything, even further removed from the advanced capitalist society from which revolution Marxist-style was supposed to spring than the other countries coming under Communist Party rule at the end of the War. See, for example, Stavro Skendi , Albania (Praeger, 1958); Nicholas C. Pano The People's Republic of Albania (Johns Hopkins Press, 1968); Ramadan Marmalluku Albania and the Albanians (London: Hurst, 1975); and A. Logorcci The Albanians: Europe's Forgotten Survivors (Gollancz, 1977).

See Review of Overseas Representation: Report of the Central Policy Review Staff (HMSO, 1977), p. 227.

English ed, Tirana, 1976, p. 200.

English ed, Tirana, 1976, pp. 172-173.

"Albanians send home Chinese advisers" in The Times, July 26, 1977.

The Military Balance 1977-8 (IISS, 1977 ), p. 29.

An indication of the seriousness of these divisions can be gleaned from Enver Hoxha , op. cit pp. 7-10 and Mehmct Shehu Report on the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1976-80) (Tirana, 1977), pp. 4-6, 17-23, 82-109.