740.0011 PW (Peace)/3–2548
Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Hugh Borton, Special Assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (Butterworth)
Following the FEC meeting, Mr. Liu, who is the Chinese representative on Committee 3, raised informally the question of a Japanese Peace Conference. In answer to the question as to how long we could afford to continue without a conference and when we expected one would be called, I told Mr. Liu I had no idea in view of the three different positions taken by the interested governments. He stated that in recent conversations with Mr. Dolbin of the Soviet Delegation it was clear that the Soviets continued to hold firm to their position. As for [Page 691] the Chinese, Mr. Liu said that they could not afford to attend a conference voting by two-thirds majority as the British Commonwealth countries would always have enough votes to veto any Chinese proposal. In reply to a question as to what our present position was and whether we intended to go ahead without the Soviet Union, I said that so far we had been unable to discover a formula that would be acceptable to all concerned.
Ambassador Koo then joined the conversation and said that as far as he could see it would be very difficult to have a conference at the present time.