Sino-German cooperation

Sino-German cooperation
Republic of China propaganda illustration (c. 1930) celebrating cooperation between its military and that of the German Weimar Republic.
Chinese name
Chinese	中德合作
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōng-Dé Hézuò Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Zong1 Dak1 Hap6 Zok3
German name
German	Chinesisch-Deutsche Kooperation

Cooperation between China and Germany was instrumental in modernising the industry and the armed forces of the Republic of China between 1926 and 1941.

At the time, the Republic of China was fraught with factional warlordism and foreign incursions. The Northern Expedition (1928) nominally unified China under Kuomintang (KMT) control, yet Imperial Japan loomed as the greatest foreign threat. The Chinese urgency for modernising its military and national defence industry, coupled with Germany's need for a stable supply of raw materials, put China and the German Weimar Republic on the road of close relations from the late 1920s onwards. This continued for a time following the rise in Germany of the Nazi Party. However, intense cooperation lasted only until the start of the war with Japan in 1937. German assistance nevertheless had a profound effect on Chinese modernisation and the capability of the Chinese to resist the Japanese in the war.

The earliest Sino-German trading occurred overland through Siberia, and was subject to transit taxes by the Russian government. In order to make trading more profitable, Prussia decided to take the sea route and the first German merchant ships arrived in China, then under the Qing Dynasty, as part of the Royal Prussian Asian Trading Company of Emden, in the 1750s. In 1861, following China's defeat in the Second Opium War, the Treaty of Tientsin was signed, which opened formal commercial relations between various European states, including Prussia, with China.