Canberra, 27 April 1955
332. Top Secret Immediate
To Spender for Dulles from Menzies.
We have been considering the briefly reported offer of Chou En–lai to negotiate.1 This may well be an opportunity to explore a settlement much wider than that of the Formosa–Off–Shore problem. It has occurred to me and my Cabinet colleagues agree, that there is one course worth considering. I do not propose to say anything about it publicly, for I would not wish to create either public difficulties or embarrassment.
The suggested course is this. A four–power conference has been indicated.2 What about inviting Communist China to attend in respect of Asian matters, the conference thus becoming to that extent a five–power one? It could discuss the causes of international tension, and the ways and means of removing them.
As such a five–power conference would not be called under the machinery of the United Nations, there would be no implication of back door entry into the United Nations or of installing Communist China on the Security Council.
As the conference would consider a vast variety of causes and places of tension, the vexed question of the attendance of Nationalist China need not arise until a later stage when Formosa and the Off–Shore islands fall for consideration
Our general feeling is that Chou En–lai has arrested world attention by his offer, which may or may not be genuine. We should not allow it to be supposed that we do not favour serious negotiations for peace. From our point of view, a five–power conference could have world moral value.3
[NAA: A1209, 1957/5035]
1 See editorial note— Australia’s Proposal for a Commonwealth Guarantee of Formosa.
2 On 10 May, the French, UK and US representatives in Moscow delivered notes inviting the Soviet Union to a four–power meeting of Heads of Government, attended by their Foreign Ministers, to discuss international problems.
3 On 3 May, Menzies communicated a message to Dulles via Spender asking for Dulles’ views on the Australian Government’s proposal for a five–power conference. He observed that however ‘unpalatable it may be to deal with the Peking authorities, the only realistic course is to accept, for some purposes at least, the fact that Chinese Communists are in effective control of the Chinese mainland and its 600 million people’. In Cablegram 506 (3 May), Spender reported that Dulles was aiming at a de facto cease–fire in the Formosa Straits and did not wish to press the Nationalists to evacuate the offshore islands. Menzies replied to Spender (Cablegram 364, 10 May) that he was ‘disappointed by the United States rejection of our proposal but we do not think it would be advisable to come back at the Americans with counter–arguments before we have had an opportunity to see the development of their policies and to test the outcome of the enquiries now being made at Peking’.