Canberra, 18 July 1971
3456. Secret Priority
For Plimsoll.
Please pass following message urgently to President Nixon from Prime Minister:— Begins:
Dear Mr President,
Following your announcement of your intended visit1 to the People’s Republic of China I issued a public statement endorsing this initiative without reservation and pointing out that it was in line with my own policy seeking to normalise relations between Australia and China.2
We particularly welcome your statement that the action you are taking will ‘not be at the expense of old friends’. My Government also sincerely hopes that your visit to Peking will be successful. There is no other person as capable of taking the leadership as you are.
You should know, nonetheless, that we were placed in a quandary by our lack of any foreknowledge of what is certainly a dramatic step in the foreign policy of the United States: the more so because we have attempted under all circumstances to co-ordinate our policies and support you in what you are doing.
In saying this I appreciate that the matter was one of great delicacy, requiring complete secrecy if it were to have any hope of success.
Nevertheless, whilst details could not be given, I believe it should have been possible to advise your friends and allies of the broad trends in your thinking. This applies particularly to those who have made some contact with Peking and have kept your Government informed.
Our relations with the People’s Republic of China have in recent weeks been a matter of deep public controversy in Australia following a visit to Peking by members of the Australian Labor Party, including the Leader of the Opposition MrWhitlam.
We have felt obliged to criticise many of the things which Mr Whitlam said and did in Peking including some quite gratuitous attacks and criticism of our friends and allies including the United States and indeed his reference to the need for you yourself to change your policies or get defeated.
Nothing which I or my Ministers have said calls for any retraction on our part but some of it would have been cast differently had we been given an indication of changes in American policy along the lines I have mentioned.
Although I have been able, as have several other governments, to say that I knew of the purport of your remarks in advance it is apparent to the Australian press that there was no kind of consultation between our two Governments. This has naturally led to the assumption that our relations are not as close as they should be, which is surely something that neither of us want.
Australia has for some months now been engaged in trying to develop a dialogue with Peking through contact with Chinese representatives in other capitals, principally Paris, designed to normalise diplomatic relationships.3 We have kept the United States informed of these contacts which, while at the outset referred to obstacles relating to our relations with the United States and our general attitude towards the People’s Republic of China, have basically boiled down now to an insistence that we abandon the Republic of China on Taiwan.
There has been a growing realisation by the Australian public that whether or not we will stand by the Republic of Taiwan is the sticking point. But great confusion has now been created by your announcement of 16th July. I am being asked to explain how the United States can honourably do things which Australia cannot do.
I hope that when Secretary Rogers sees Ambassador Plimsoll on Monday these misunderstandings can be cleared up.
In the meantime, the question of our policy towards Chinese representation in the United Nations remains unresolved. The ‘Albanian resolution’ has already been listed and will on the normal order of events be voted on before any resolution which you or we may decide to sponsor. I fear that unless we act quickly and in concert with our friends, the Albanian resolution will be carried and the Republic of China expelled from the United Nations.
May I once again stress to you the desirability of the United States, Japan, New Zealand and Australia concerting a policy on this important matter?
Yours Sincerely, William McMahon.4
Ends.
[NAA: A1838, 3107/38/18, xv]
1 In his address to the nation on 15 July, Nixon announced that Kissinger had held talks with Chou En-lai in Peking from 9–11 July. He said that Chou had invited the President to visit China at an appropriate date before May 1972—an offer that had been accepted. He further stated that the ‘meeting between the leaders of China and the United States is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries and also to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides’.
2 On 16 July McMahon issued a statement welcoming without reservation Nixon’s statement and noting that the President’s purpose of normalising relationships with China was for some time ‘the publicly-announced policy of the Australian Government’. McMahon drew the attention of the Australian people to Nixon’s statement that the action he was taking would ‘not be at the expense of old friends’.
3 A note by Waller on a 19 July telephone conversation with McMahon reads: ‘Talked about normalisation. But letter to Nixon mentions “diplomatic relations”. Should we tell Plimsoll? I said I thought so’.
4 On 19 July, McMahon discussed United States–China relations on the telephone with Shann. Shann indicated that Kissinger must have discussed Taiwan, Indochina and recognition of the PRC with Chou and that the United States could not both recognise the PRC and protect the ROC. To McMahon’s query whether this was not devious, Shann responded that Nixon could not risk the humiliation of a failed visit and that therefore ‘he must know of likely success’. McMahon and Shann agreed that it was unlikely that the Australian Government would find out what Kissinger had said to Chou ‘and that whole formulation of our foreign policy must be conducted in the dark’.