800.796/5–2744
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Assistant Secretary of State (Berle)
Mr. Chang Kia-Ngau20a came in to see me at his request, informally, to talk about some aviation points which were bothering him. He had with him the draft of a cable he proposed to send to Chungking. I inferred this was in answer to an inquiry from Chungking asking his recommendations as to the positions China should take in the current air conversations. The principal points he raised were these:
(1) Our plan envisaged making the right of freedom of transit subject to national sovereignty, and dependent on the conclusion of satisfactory arrangements for commercial outlet. China, said Chang, probably would not be asking commercial outlets to any great extent, and in one case, the Soviet Union, she feared she would not get them. Particularly in the Soviet case, if the Soviets asked freedom of transit it would embitter relations if China were to refuse them. Therefore, said Chang, he thought of recommending to his Government that they agree pro forma to the second condition, namely commercial outlet agreements, but stress heavily the fact that free transit was subject to sovereignty, and therefore to reasonable regulations. He then developed the reasonable regulation idea. He said he thought this might mean marking out security areas, and asked what I thought of that. I told him that it all depended on whether the regulations were reasonable. We did not mean by that blacking out great geographic areas. Further, we thought these regulations ought to be non-discriminatory, applying to everyone alike, including the nationals of the regulating country.
Then he said that he thought that the regulations ought to include the power to prescribe routes over which the planes could fly. In fact, he thought, even the right of innocent transit could exist only if there had been bilateral arrangements fixing the routes which planes would be allowed to fly. I told him I thought this smashed up the [Page 484] whole principle. We had to think in terms of European countries; if there had to be bilateral agreements, even on the right of innocent passage, it would imply that any country could withhold permission, and then the principle had disappeared. I told him I thought in practice planes seeking innocent passage would not want to wander about, but would either proceed by direct line to their destinations or would follow some established commercial route.
Chang seemed to think that something might be done along that line. I told him I hoped we could adopt a generalized principle which did not mean that we were back to the pre-war task of negotiating route agreements with every country in the world irrespective of whether anyone wanted to land in those countries.
(2) He asked what our views were as to private planes, other than the general commercial airlines, who might wish to seek the right of innocent passage. I told him this was a specialized subject about which there was a lot of material, and that we would have an afternoon on that in the course of the discussions and that I thought that question might be left over for that time.
(3) He asked whether the routes we had proposed on the map presented at our first meeting were alternative or supplementary. I said that for the moment they were supplementary; none of us, of course, knew whether all of them would be practicable since some of them depended on the assent of other countries, nor did we know yet whether the traffic would justify all three routes. Mr. Pogue had observed that we would not necessarily wish to put them all into effect at once, but hoped to have the right to do so. He likewise asked whether we wanted a route to the capital of China—pointing out that it might not be economical to have a line running to Nanking as well as Shanghai. I said that I found it difficult to think of a situation in which direct communication with the Chinese capital would not be of great interest to us.
(4) He said that while it was not strictly a point of these conversations, he hoped to bring up the point of aid to the development of Chinese internal aviation. I told him we should be glad to consider sympathetically any suggestion he wished to make on that point.
- Chinese aviation representative.↩