Economic Espionage, Technocratic Reforms and the Czechoslovak Economic Diplomacy in Japan (1957-1968)
Abstrakt
The paper aims to analyze the strategies of the Czechoslovak scientific environment towards the initial phases of the Japanese "economic miracle" in the late 1950s and during 1960s. An integral part of these strategies was economic espionage, which inadvertently created a dichotomy between the Czechoslovak natural sciences and the humanities depending on the access of both fields to the scholarships to Japan.
The target of the Czechoslovak economic espionage was not only the Japanese scientific innovation but also the local system of economic redistribution (e.g. indicative planning). These espionage strategies were for example implemented by famous travelers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund who visited Japan under the patronage of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1963.