Office of the Historian

80. Telegram From the Embassy in the United Kingdom to the Department of State1

London, December 3, 1955—1 p.m.

2281. For Merchant. Received this a.m. from Wright (Foreign Office) letter to Merchant from Kirkpatrick re China trade controls. Text is as follows:

Dear Livie:

I am sorry not to have been able to reply sooner to your letter of November 16 about the future treatment of the China trade controls.2 The government have been giving very serious thought to the issues involved and my Secretary of State has now replied to the letter he received from Mr. Dulles.3 I attach a copy of this reply.

It is naturally our hope that the United States government may yet be able to agree to an alignment of the China list with that in force for the Soviet bloc. If we can march in step this would clearly be the best solution and would, I believe, given the strength of feeling here, be a real contribution to Anglo-American relations.

As things are, however, the government’s position in defending the present scope of the China embargo has become untenable. Indeed the whole system of security controls on East/West trade is [Page 274] being undermined by the maintenance of controls which can no longer be logically defended on strategic grounds.

Consequently if by the early days of the new year when Parliament reassembles an agreed alignment of the two lists is still ruled out, we shall inform the China Committee of the Consultative Group that H.M. Government can no longer see any strategic justification for banning the additional commodities for China, and that from January 15 we propose, by a gradual unobtrusive process, and over a period, to bring the United Kingdom list for China into conformity with the agreed list for the Soviet bloc. We should tell them that we intended to remove items in groups of two or three at a time giving the committee in each case advance notice of the item or group of items to be removed from the United Kingdom list and the date when removal would be operative.

While keeping our partners in the Consultative Group fully informed in this way we should not expect to make any general statement in Parliament. The gradual whittling down of our list, as opposed to a wholesale reduction, would be a further discouragement to publicity.

In concluding I should like to emphasise once more that our decision to proceed in this way has been taken only after earnest consideration and after my Secretary of State had successfully resisted strong pressure for an immediate change of policy so as to give your negotiators leisure to play the trade card in their discussions with the Chinese.4

Yours sincerely, Geoffrey Harrison5 (for Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick)

Letter to Secretary Dulles mentioned paragraph 1 sent immediately preceding message as Embtel 2280.

Aldrich
  1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 493.009/12–355. Secret; Priority; Limited Distribution.↩
  2. See footnote 3, Document 75.↩
  3. See the editorial note, supra.↩

  4. Telegram 2302 from London, December 5, reported that the Embassy had sought a further clarification of the letters from Macmillan and Kirkpatrick at the “Ministerial level” that day. The telegram reads in part as follows:

    “Foreign Office officials explained while firm objective of British Ministers is removal differentials COCOM China Committee lists, primary immediate purpose is relieve parliamentary, China trade groups criticism by removing from China list as early as possible those items in which trade interest presently greatest.” (Department of State, Central Files, 493.009/12–555)

    ↩
  5. Assistant Under Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office.↩