Complementary assistance: multilateral exchanges between the Soviet Union, China and Eastern European countries in Cold War Mongolia

During the Cold War, large-scale urban development projects were launched in Mongolia with technical assistance from various socialist countries – China, East Germany (the GDR), Poland, Czechoslovakia and, above all, the Soviet Union. Looking at the involvement of these dissimilar countries to Mongolia, this article challenges simplistic narratives about bilateral East-South exchanges, and frames socialist development assistance as multilateral, asymmetric and complementary. It argues that some of the iconic projects of socialist development in Mongolia could hardly be called products of any one donor’s aid programme, and instead required the cooperation of various providers, collaborating on multiple, interconnected fronts. Such multilateral assistance was marked by highly hierarchical racialised divisions of labour, and created strong interdependencies between various countries involved in Mongolia.