Chinese foreign relations and foreign trade during the Cultural Revolution’s radical phase (1966–1969) were different than during the period from 1970 to 1976. The radicals’ control of the Foreign Ministry affected the Chinese missions in Switzerland between 1966 and 1969. Because of Switzerland’s function as the Chinese headquarters in Western Europe, Swiss diplomats were among the few foreigners who remained relatively unaffected by Red Guard measures and other events in Beijing. Although diplomatic tensions occurred between Switzerland and China, these did not lead to a rupture of official relations. This preferential treatment changed during the period from 1970 to 1976, when Switzerland lost importance because China established relations with the majority of the Western nations. The anti-capitalist and anti-Western fervour of the Red Guards did not stop trade between China and Switzerland completely. In fact, Sino-Swiss trade continued – albeit haltingly – during the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. The improvement of political relations between China and Western European countries, however, also increased Western European interest in the Chinese market. The last part of the chapter, therefore, discusses how the Swiss government and Swiss companies tried to stave off this competition in the early to mid-1970s.

From the 1950s to at least the 1970s, China established and operated a variety of intelligence networks from Switzerland. The chapter relies on thousands of files by the Federal Police as well as Chinese memoirs, biographies, commemorative volumes of former agents, and publications on the history of Chinese intelligence to discuss different forms of intelligence activities carried out by Chinese diplomats in Switzerland. Showing just how intertwined Chinese foreign policy and intelligence were, the chapter argues that diplomatic staff were so often also active as intelligence agents that it could be argued that the Chinese used a hybrid form of diplomat–agent in Switzerland. Some of the national, international, and transnational intelligence networks that the Chinese operated from Switzerland show that Switzerland functioned as a Chinese intelligence hub in Cold War Europe. These include a network of UN officials, ethnic Chinese students and scientists, Chinese restaurants, and Chinese Indonesians. The chapter also describes the Swiss Federal Police’s counterintelligence measures as a reaction to the Chinese intelligence activities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the development of Communist Chinese intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s in order to show how this contributed to Chinese intelligence activities in Europe.

China’s use of Switzerland changed as a result of the Sino-Soviet split, as China tried to compensate for the loss of assistance from the Soviet Union and its allies by increasing its relations with Western Europe. The Swiss missions in Switzerland were important for China’s efforts to increase its presence in Latin America and Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The case of nine Chinese who were arrested in Brazil in 1964 is used to demonstrate how China’s missions in Switzerland contributed to China’s global presence, and how the Swiss government and Swiss businesses were affected by Chinese actions abroad. Swiss support for Tibet and Tibetan refugees is discussed to show that the Swiss government also took advantage of the importance that Switzerland played for China, and managed to get away with actions that China did not tolerate from other nations. The chapter also discusses the effects that the Great Leap Forward had on Chinese and Swiss bilateral trade relations from 1958 to 1965, how Swiss companies and government officials tried to increase trade, and how the Sino-Soviet split led China to increase the scope of its network of embargo goods dealers that it operated out of Bern.

In 1965, the Swiss satirical journal Nebelspalter published a cartoon about the large number of staff at the Chinese embassy in Bern. In the cartoon, a smiling Chinese man has his legs rooted by a large clew of two-headed worms, which symbolise Chinese intelligence and propaganda activity. Under the cartoon, a caption states that the worms are trying to turn ‘Swiss soil into Chinese soil’ (see Figure 0.1).

China’s policies and measures could also be thought of as a continuation of those in the Cold War period, and that an analysis of Sino-Swiss relations in the Cold War can help our understanding of China’s relations with Western nations today.

From the 1950s on, Sino-Swiss relations were unique in Western Europe. Switzerland’s early recognition of China and its neutrality led to a great deal of goodwill in China and extraordinarily amicable relations in the 1950s. China also used its diplomatic missions in Switzerland as political, economic, and cultural hubs for Western Europe and in some cases even for the entire world. For Switzerland, Sino-Swiss relations were supposed to establish Switzerland as an internationally respected, neutral mediating power. However, China mistrusted Swiss neutrality, and it also used Switzerland as a European hub for embargo goods deals. It was only with the Geneva Conference and China’s use of ‘peaceful coexistence’ as the official basis for its foreign policy that Chinese official statements on Swiss neutrality improved.