This chapter is about catching up with old comrades, trying to make new friends and pretending that all is good and getting better in a parallel reality of socialist feel good brotherhood. At least that was what the GDR under Erich Honecker had planned for in the 1980s when he ordered the resumption of political, trade and cultural relations with China. To be sure, all of that not because Beijing had all of a sudden become East Berlin's natural choice for a like-minded socialist friend. Rather because both East Berlin and Beijing panicked: Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev was promoting and adopting reforms, which both East Berlin and Beijing feared stood for the end of socialism as they knew it. Moscow's 'socialism with a human face', the very opposite of what Beijing practised on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, so to speak. However, the GDR had very little to offer of what Beijing wanted in terms of goods and technology and was quite simply not taken seriously enough to earn itself the title of Beijing's 'best friend.' All of that changed in June of 1989 when Beijing ordered the PLA to shoot into the crowds on Tiananmen Square and Honecker's GDR applauded the suppression of what Beijing and East Berlin agreed was a foreign-sponsored 'counter-revolution.' As it turned out, that was the last time Honecker would have anything to celebrate and applaud in 1989.When SED Secretary-General Erich Honecker visited Beijing in October 1986, the Soviet Union and China had no political relations to speak of due to the Sino-Soviet Split of the late 1950s/early 1960s. Moscow and Beijing would only re-establish high-level political relations in the very early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union (when the GDR had already become part of the reunified Federal Republic of Germany, FRG). Therefore, Honecker's visit to China in 1986 was always going to be observed with suspicion by his political masters in Moscow. To be sure, the Soviet Union of 1986 led by Gorbachev had become fairly uninterested in exerting political, let alone, ideological, control over East Berlin after the reform-minded Gorbachev took over power in Moscow. Certainly also a matter of resources and priorities for Moscow under Gorbachev. He wanted reforms at home in the Soviet Union, leaving him with less resources to control Moscow's soon-to-become former East European vassal states. When the GDR 'congratulated' Beijing's political leaders for having
