In 1969, Geng Biao, the Chinese ambassador to Albania, wrote a letter to Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua. In his letter, Geng Biao solemnly pointed out the problems of China's diplomatic aid in Albania.
Geng Biao wrote in the letter: "Albanians do not need so much aid at all, and there is too much fertilizer sent by China, which is piled up in the ground and rotted; China sent too much fabric, they made the material into clothes, but instead exported it to the mainland to earn foreign exchange..."
In the 1960s, China called Albania "a beacon of socialism in Europe," and Sino-Arab relations at that time were very close, arguably closer than brothers. China has generously donated money for this poor country brother, and what Geng Biao wrote is true.
But by the 1970s, relations between China and Albania had broken down. Because of the Sino-US contacts, Albanian leader Hoxha even scolded China.
Albania's "white-eyed wolf" behavior is actually determined by the personal style of the leader Hoxha.
Hoxha scolded the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, and NATO countries all over and over again. The country of Albania often made good friends with a certain country the day before, asking for money, guns, and grain, and the next day it turned its face and did not recognize people, and insulted its friends, which was notoriously capricious.
Internally, Hoxha was also one of the wonders of the 20th century.
Hoxha felt that he had made too many enemies, and that nato in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east would attack him in the future, so he vigorously engaged in "people's war" at home.
Because the whole country is full of bunkers, now Albania is also called "the country of bunkers".
So how exactly was socialist Albania established? How strange is the country's leader, Comrade Hoxha? How pitiful is Albania after the end of the Cold War?
Revolutionary active students: Hoxha
Albania is located in the southwest of the Balkan Peninsula, bordered by the Yugoslav states to the north, Greece to the south, and Italy to the west across the sea.
Albania's territory is only 28,000 square kilometers, and the country is mainly mountainous, nicknamed "the country of mountain eagles". The country's population has long hovered around 1 million, growing to 2 million during the Cold War and approaching 3 million in recent years.
Ancient Albania was ruled by the surrounding countries for a long time, and for a long time there was no state power, but only a region, where the Romans and Greeks established a ruling government.
In recent centuries, with the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Arabs, who had expanded into Europe, had conquered Albania.
It was not until after the 20th century, when the Ottoman Empire gradually disintegrated and the Allies occupied Albania after World War I, that an Albanian kingdom was propped up here.
But the country had been independent for less than 20 years, and with the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Albania was occupied by Italy next door.
During World War II, the Albanian Communist Party and fascists engaged in an underground struggle, including Enver, who had returned from studying in France. Hoxha was the most positive.
Hoxha came from a Muslim family of "imams", but under the guidance of his uncle, he was not only a non-believer, but also an active atheist.
After receiving a secondary education in his native country, Hoxha decided to study in France and became a communist by being exposed to communist ideas at French universities.
After 1936, Hoxha returned to Tirana, the capital of Albania, as a teacher. However, in 1939, when Italy destroyed the Kingdom of Albania, Hoxha refused to recognize the fascist government and was expelled from school.
Unemployment did not crush the revolutionary, however, and Hoxha soon collaborated with the Albanian Communist Party to open an "underground traffic station" in Tirana to contact Communists throughout the country for anti-fascist activities.
In 1941, the Italian-backed fascist government ordered the arrest of Hoxha, who, although he escaped, was sentenced to death by the country's courts in absentia, making Hoxha a fugitive from Albania.
Thereafter, Hoxha formally joined the armed struggle. Under the leadership of Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party, the Albanian Communist Party united to form an anti-fascist revolutionary front.
Second, Hoxha diplomacy: making "friends" depends entirely on the mood
In 1943, due to the fall of Italian fascism, the "National Liberation Army" developed by leaps and bounds, occupying most of southern Albania.
But the Germans soon came in, and the Nazi Germans, in alliance with an Albanian organization called the National Front, defeated the National Liberation Army.
Hoxha's forces were almost completely wiped out by Germany's elite mountain troops and forced to run to the Greek border to the south.
Soon, Hoxha's "National Liberation Army" received material support from Greece from Britain, and in 1944, when Nazi Germany was weakening, albania's "National Liberation Army" counterattacked with the support of the British.
In the autumn of that year when Hoxha's troops went north to fight guerrilla warfare with the Germans, the Germans withdrew from Greece and Albania, and the "National Liberation Army" liberated the capital and established a provisional government, with Hoxha as prime minister.
In January 1946, the People's Republic of Albania was established, with Hoxha as President of the Council of Ministers and Minister for Foreign Affairs.
After "Chairman Huo" took office, because he himself was a hardcore fan of Comrade Loving Father, Albania became a hardcore subordinate of the Soviet Union, taking the Soviet Union's orders as holy wills.
At that time, even when Comrade Father suggested that the Albanian Communist Party be renamed the lower "Party of Labour", Hoxha did so.
In 1948, Albania presented itself diplomatically for the first time.
In that year, comrade Father of the Soviet Union and Tito of Yugoslavia broke up, tito was unwilling to accept the leadership of the Soviet "Lao Tzu Party", so the Soviet Union withdrew all its advisers and experts from Yugoslavia and launched a polemic with Yugoslavia.
The "Southern Jiangsu Incident" was so loud that the Soviet Union finally cut off trade with Yugoslavia, and Eastern European countries followed suit.
In Albania in particular, the "Arab Communist Party" obviously grew up with the Help of the Yugoslav Partisans of Tito, but Hoxha firmly followed the Soviet Union and broke with Yugoslavia.
Hoxha even carried out a party purge in the country, and killed and killed pro-Tito cadres, which greatly annoyed Yugoslavia.
Albania obediently followed the Soviet Union for the first 10 years of its founding, but in 1956, because of the death of its father, Khrushchev came to power, and Comrade Hoxha broke up with the Soviet Union.
Hirsch's criticism of his father and his rejection of the "Stalinist system" made Hoxha hate Khrushchev, so Hoxha decided to break with the CPSU once and for all.
Looking at the world at that time, the two major socialist powers of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had tense relations with Albania, and Comrade Hoxha could be described as "unaccompanied" in Europe.
In the end, Hoxha decided to set his sights on China.
Third, with the world deadlocked, Hoxha began to build bunkers
In the "Sino-Soviet Controversy" of the 1960s, Albania supported China and thus became a brother with New China.
In 1968, when the Soviet army raided Czechoslovakia and extinguished the "Prague Spring", Comrade Hoxha felt that the Soviet army was too domineering, and actually withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and declared that it would go it alone.
Throughout the 1960s, China and Albania were intimate, and Hoxha was in tune with China in some political opinions, and China once called Albania "the beacon of the Socialist World in Europe."
At that time, China's international situation was very similar to that of Albania, both countries were socialist camps, breaking with the West, but also broke with the Soviet Union, becoming a "lone boat" in the world diplomatic circles.
During the period when the two countries were warming up, China also gave Albania all kinds of assistance, money, materials, and weapons.
The Albanian Defence Forces had only 20,000 men, but Hoxha, who wanted to engage in the "people's war," asked China for more than 700,000 rifles and hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition to arm the Country into iron barrels.
In those days, Albania and China would never bend around asking for things, and the country's officials would not be embarrassed, but directly listed the documents and let China send them.
For example, in 1972, the Albanian Ministry of National Defense delegation actually directly asked China for thousands of trucks and tanks, which startled Premier Zhou, and finally Premier Zhou could only politely refuse.
Because of Comrade Hoxha's insatiable greed, there was a large amount of Chinese aid waste in Albania at the end of the 60s, and then China also reduced its assistance to Albania.
In the early 1970s, as relations between China and the United States eased, Comrade Hoxha in Europe could not sit still. Hoxha also issued another article criticizing the Chinese comrades for "not going up to the tao" and declaring a break with China.
After China's reform and opening up in 1978, Hoxha scolded China for "following the old path of the Soviet Union", and then tore his face with China.
Hoxha was now in his old age, dictatorial at home and prone to governing.
However, Hoxha still stubbornly believes that "Albania is the last 'bulwark' of world socialism, the enemy of the reactionaries of the whole world." ”
However, although Hoxha had been a national leader and military leader all his life, he did not have a formal military academy degree and lacked actual combat experience.
The battles he fought were guerrilla warfare between the "National Liberation Army" in the mountains and the Italian and German armies.
Hoxha believed that in a mountainous country like Albania, guerrilla warfare was king, so 70% of the Albanian army was infantry, and its tactic was to fight guerrilla warfare in the mountains.
There were nearly 3 million people in Albania at that time, of which more than 700,000 were military militias, party, government, military organs, schools had military training, and 12-year-old children had to receive military training to learn to shoot and create traps.
In the early 1970s, Hoxha, in order to provide protection for hundreds of thousands of infantry, began to order the construction of bunkers throughout the country.
When it comes to bunkers, many people think of the glorious fortress of the French "Maginot", but Albania did not have the strength to build that kind of thing.
Albania's "fortress" is an infantry bunker, most of which can only accommodate 1-3 people, the main body of the fortress is embedded in the ground, there is a hemispherical cover on it, there is a firing hole in the front, there is no passage connected to other bunkers, basically a single bunker.
Only in strategic locations has Albania built larger command bunkers, warehouse bunkers, and anti-nuclear bunkers for officials and important figures to take refuge.
Hoxha "without a day of death", Albania without hope
Logically, this kind of tactical "cement coffin" is enough to build some on the border and in some dangerous areas, after all, modern warfare has a variety of ways to hit bunkers, and it is obviously unrealistic to rely on this kind of thing to block the invasion of enemy countries.
But the leader, Hoxha, hollowed out the treasury to repair bunkers, and by the time of Hoxha's death in 1985, Albania had built hundreds of thousands of pillboxes in every corner of the country.
There are large and small cement packages on the borders, roads, farmland, factories, and streets of Algeria, and Hoxha's order is: "Wherever there are people, there must be bunkers." ”
Eventually, these cement hemispheres spread throughout Albania, not only affecting the aesthetics, but also occupying arable land and wasting resources.
However, Comrade Hoxha could not listen to any opinion, and the Ministry of National Defense had doubts about this, and Hoxha replaced the Minister of Defense; The Foreign Ministry began to complain, and Hoxha replaced the Foreign Minister.
For every dozen bunkers built, the manpower and resources consumed are equivalent to building one kilometer of road. These steel bars and cements are basically china's free aid in that year, in fact, they are the blood and sweat of the Chinese people.
Albania spent nearly $200 million on fortifications, dealing a heavy blow to the country's economy. These bunkers cost more than the "Maginot" line, enough to give each Albanian family an apartment.
After the 1980s, Albania's economy faced a serious crisis. In order to survive, Hoxha reconnected with Yugoslavia to the north, and the two countries resumed normal trade, which was a mouthful of blood for Albania.
But at the same time, Hoxha was sick and assassinated, and finally fell ill.
In the last years of his life, Hoxha handed over power to his successor, the famous "microphone" Aria.
Aliyah firmly maintained Hoxha's rule and ruled with Hoxha's ideas, thus gaining Hoxha's trust.
In 1985, Comrade Hoxha died of a heart attack, he was buried in the martyrs' cemetery in the capital, and his successor, Alia, said: "Hoxha is such a great man, forever living in our hearts, he is immortal!" ”
So Hoxha's tombstone has only birthday 1908, no death date 1985.
Five years after Hoxha's death, a drastic upheaval in Eastern Europe swept through Albania, and the country, like other countries, began "democratic reforms."
When the bourgeois government opposed to the Workers' Party came to power, the first one was to overthrow Hoxha.
As a result, Hoxha's statue was overthrown, books were burned, and even the body was exhumed and sent to the civilian grave, because the government said: "This man is not a martyr at all, and has no right to be buried with a martyr." ”
After 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the haze of the Cold War was no longer, and there was no longer the fierce East-West confrontation of the past. As a result, a small country like Albania suddenly loses all attention, and the big powers no longer fight for it.
At that time, it was countries that lined up to find Albania, and The country of Albania loved to answer, and now Albania wants to make friends with various countries, but countries have no interest.
Since then, Albania's economy has become worse and worse, the country's industry is closed, agriculture is backward, and there is nothing to come up with except a little chromium ore to earn foreign exchange.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, albania saw a wave of people fleeing across the border, with about 100,000 people fleeing to Italy and Greece to survive.
In order to stabilize the government, the bourgeois government began reforms, selling state assets, attracting foreign investment, and opening up financial markets.
However, the Albanian government's lack of governing experience and lack of supervision of the market eventually led to the emergence of some financial fraud companies in Albania.
These "vampires" lure ordinary people's deposits at high interest rates, promising more than 30% profits, but ultimately could not cash in.
In 1997, the "Albanian financial crisis" broke out as fraudulent financial companies fled.
In the midst of the unrest, the supporters of the various political parties fought on a scale comparable to the civil war.
During the melee, the Arsenal of the Albanian army was looted and hundreds of thousands of guns and hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition were missing. In the end, the United Nations ordered peacekeepers to enter, which stabilized the country.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Albania became Europe's largest arms distribution center and source of human trafficking, and was listed by the United Nations as a "hopeless country".
Previously, such titles would only appear in African and Latin American countries, and Albania was the only European country to receive the title.
It was not until 2010, thanks to the help of the European Union, that Albania's national conditions gradually improved, and in recent years the economy has finally improved.
Everyone who has been to the country is impressed by Albania's "bunkers", because the government has no money to demolish the bunkers, and there are now 170,000 bunkers in the country.
They will stand on this land forever as monuments to the last era.
Literature/Commerce Field
Resources:
1. "Behind the Bunkers of Albania", Kong Hanbing
2. "The Inside Story of the Honeymoon in China and Albania", Fan Chengzuo