Canberra, 16 February 1972
Secret
China Policy
I pray leave to wonder whether it is in the Minister’s or the Department’s interests to retain the penultimate sentence in para 10 of the Minister’s Cabinet submission.1 From the Minister’s point of view, it could lead to questioning in Cabinet as to why the Department favoured the third option2—questioning which it would not be easy to answer convincingly given the terms in which the Minister has presented the issue. From the Department’s point of view, it could lead to charges of unreality and ‘capitulationism’—all the more unfairly given that we were in favour not of simply accepting Peking’s conditions but rather of fudging over the issue in the Canadian manner so that we could truthfully say that we neither challenged nor endorsed Peking’s claim to Taiwan.
2. The sentence could be simply excised without in any way affecting the flow of the paragraph.
3. Perhaps I may also be allowed to observe—as others may well do—that para 11 (ii)3 is entirely consistent with early Australian recognition along Canadian lines. The real point of difficulty, which is not mentioned in that sub–paragraph, is the reciprocal removal of Embassies—though even that could be justified on the grounds that their maintenance would in effect amount to a challenge to Peking’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.
4. However, I recognise that the Minister has decided his policy line and that that is the end of the matter. Moreover, because paragraph 11 (ii) as drafted is not inconsistent with recognition a la Canadienne, it avoids the disadvantage for the Government of making it impossible for it to change its mind on recognition in the next few years without having to eat its words.
[matter omitted]
[NAA: A1838, 3107/38/18, xxiii]
1 Draft not published; the final version is Document 300. The aforementioned sentence of the draft read: ‘It is fair to say that, excluding political factors, the advice of my Department would be in favour of adopting the third option, i.e. recognition of the P.R.C. accepting its conditions and withdrawing our diplomatic representative from Taipei’.
2 See paragraph 4(c), Document 300.
3 This matches the corresponding paragraph in Document 300.