Office of the Historian

272. Memorandum From the Deputy Special Assistant for Intelligence (Arneson) to the Secretary of State1

Washington, July 17, 1957.

SUBJECT

  • Intelligence Note: Chinese Communists Answer Secretary’s 28 June Speech

Secretary Dulles’ 28 June address on China policy has evoked formal and informal response from the Chinese Communists. At the final session of the National People’s Congress (Peiping’s legislative assembly) on 15 July, Chang Han-fu, a deputy foreign minister, gave what might be described as the regime’s formal reply to the Secretary’s speech. Meanwhile Chou En-lai has been telling newsmen and visiting delegations that China can wait a hundred years for US recognition and has no need for “friends of Dulles’ kind.”

Chang Han-fu’s speech concentrated on what the Chinese Communists probably consider the Secretary’s main arguments against US recognition of Peiping: the record of aggression, the value of US recognition in relation to Peiping’s ambitions in Southeast Asia, and the stability of the Peiping regime. Chang charged that the US, not Communist China, was guilty of successive armed aggression. The Korean hostilities and uprisings in Tibet, he charged, were fomented by the US. He claimed that it was not within US power to bar Peiping’s contacts with other countries and that the trade embargo actually helped Communist China by bringing about “economic independence” and greater cooperation within the bloc while it harmed the relations between the US and its allies. Chang rejected the notion that criticism by the “rightists” is connected with the regime’s stability.

Particularly irritating to the Chinese Communists has been the reference to criticisms of the Communist Party by non-Communists in China as proof of the regime’s unpopularity and weakness. A 3 July editorial in People’s Daily stated that Dulles, like Acheson, based US hopes on “democratic individualists” but that much less could be expected from this insignificant group now than in 1949. The editorial claimed that this group became disillusioned with the US by the publication of the 1949 White Paper, United States Relations With China.2

A similar memorandum has been addressed to the Under Secretary.

  1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 793.00/7–1757. Confidential. Drafted in the Division of Research for the Far East, Office of Intelligence Research, by Culver, Gleysteen.↩
  2. Department of State, United States Relations With China (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949).↩