Propiedades relacionadas a la ρ-compacidad

1 B. Grant, The Crisis of Loyalty, p.79. See also G. Clark, In Fear of China, Melbourne, Lansdowne, 1967, p.188.

2 M. Edwards, "Australia and the 'China Threat'", Australia's Neighbours, no. 75, May-June 1971, p.l contains an impressive catalogue of such statements.

3 According to one of Chifley's Cabinet Ministers, it was thought unethical to make a decision that would bind the successor government, This argument is unconvincing. There was another, however; as Arthur Calwell has

remarked: "We weren't going to go as a propaganda Party on behalf of Communist China, particularly when stories were coming through about the atrocities that Mao committed, and most of them were correct. Mao is just as much a mass murderer as Hitler or Stalin." See D. Stephens, "Three Labor Veterans Look Back", The Australian Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3 (September, 1974), pp.86-7.

but the L-CP was swept into office, and so Chifley never had to make the recognition decision. The initial reaction of the new Foreign Minister seemed conciliatory towards the Peking Government, perhaps recognition was contemplated*:

It is not for us to question the kind of government the Chinese people choose to live under. If they are satisfied with the Communist Government, that is their affair. As I have said before, we do not accept the inevitability of a clash between the

democratic and the Communist way of life; ...We should very much dislike seeing the traditional contacts

severed between China and the Western world.2

This accomadatory tone, however, was quickly dispelled with the onset of the Korean War in June 1950. As R.G. Casey, the Foreign Minister, told Parliament in November 1953:

The real threat to the peace of Asia and the Pacific today does not come from Japan, but from Communist imperialism based on the mainland of China... which has already been responsible for an aggressive war in Korea and which looms in the background of the fighting in Indo-China.3

The Korean War was seen by the Australian people as a firm indicator of the aggressiveness of the new Communist Government, a view which has since been questioned by various academic writers,^ and as one foreign editor has latterly recorded:

1 J. Camilleri, op.cit. 3 p.51.

2 P. Spender, APD, (H. of R.), 9 March 1950, v o l . 206, p.626.

3 R.G. Casey, Friends and Neighbours3 Melbourne, Cheshire, 1954, p.85. Nonetheless, the Casey Diaries reveal the former Foreign Minister as an advocate in Cabinet for the recognition of the Peking Government, T.B. Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister, The Diaries of R.G. Casey

1951-60, London, Collins, 1972, pp.189, 213-4. Menzies also made some moves towards recognizing Peking, but on both occasions "stopped short", T.B. Millar, "Australia’s Defence and the Indian Ocean", The 1974 Sir

Robert Menzies Lecture, 15 July 1974, Roneo.

4 See, for example, A.S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu> The Decision to enter the Korean War, New York, MacMillan, 1960.

In the 1950’s the Yellow Peril threat was transferred to the newly-communist Chinese and the Menzies government, which had some

knowledge of the Marxist - Leninist theory of world revolution but practically none of Chinese realities, ushered in an era of Sinophobia...^

Several observers, however, have maintained that the fear of China pre­

dated the 1949 communist takeover. The present Australian Ambassador to

China, for example, told a conference on China in 1972 that: The establishment of a Communist government in Peking contributed a new element to the Australian fear, but this fear was still most firmly rooted in the older images.^

The exiguity of survey material renders it impossible to make some quantit­ ative judgements as to whether the Chinese threat replaced the Japanese

’yellow peril' or whether the former subsumed the latter. Nonetheless,

Gallup asked questions during the 1950's and early 1960's relating to the issues of trade and recognition, and it is possible to make some tentative comments arising from these data, in order to provide some background to the more intensive examination of the period between 1966 and 1972.

RECOGNITION AND UN ADMISSION

The question of whether Australia should recognize the Peking Government was asked on nine occasions between 1951 and 1964, and it would seem that the numbers who supported recognition rose and fell with

international events in which China was seen as the aggressor. For most

Australians the events of the early 1950's (the Korean War, the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, and the Indo-China situation) clearly had a

deliterious impact on their images of China. Table 4-1 shows the very low

level of support for recognition by respondents in Gallup surveys between

1 R. Duffield, Australiant 12 July 1969, in D, Pettitt (ed.), op,cit,3 p.47.

2 S. Fitzgerald, "China and Australia", in I, Wilson (ed.), China and the

1951 and 1956, a variation of only six percent. It should also be noted that majority support for Taipeh was shown only once during the whole period from 1951 to 1964. This will be discussed in further depth below. By 1957, however, after a lull in China’s external activity, Gallup reported that "Australians [were] inclined to favour recognizing the Peking

Communists as China’s government",* and this figure remained stable until September 1958, too soon to record any possible reaction to the shelling of Quemoy, but by 1962 this support had subsided.

There was a plethora of incidents and crises between 1958 and 1962 in which China was involved, and in which she was presented at the uncompromising aggressor. My task is not to prove the veracity or otherwise of government statements concerning China, but it suffices to say that China was portrayed as the subversive and militant power in the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958, the suppression of the Tibetan uprising in 1959, the Sino-Soviet split after 1960^, the formation of the Peking- Djakarta axis after 1960, the Laotian Crisis of 1961-62, turbulence in South Vietnam, and the Sino-Indian war of 1962.^ Thus, by August 1962, Australians were four-to-three against recognition, and by December they

were evenly divided; a substantial drop from the 1958 figure. For comparison, a table on China's admission to the UN has also been presented.

1 APOP, 1278-1287, October-November 1957. 2 G. Clark, op.cit., p.168,

3 For a defence of China’s part in the war see N. Maxwell, India's China War, London, Cape, 1970.

Recognize Recognize No opinion

Peking Taipeh

Which do you think Australia Feb 1951 22 46 32

should recognize as the

official government of China Oct 1954** 28 55 17

- the Chiang Kai-shek Aug 1955 24 36 40

Government in Formosa, or

the new Government in Peking? Aug 1956 28 35 37

Sept 1957 42 32 26

Do you think Australia should, Sept 1958 41 34 25 or should not, recognize the

Communist Government of China? Aug 1962 32 42 26

Dec 1962 36 36 28

Feb 1964 35 37 28

** Which should be recognized as the legal government of China - the Chiang Kai-shek Government in Formosa, or the Communist Government in Peking?

Australian policy-makers had shown some independence of thought during the 1 9 5 0 's, such as their call for American restraint over the o f f ­ shore islands dispute and their decision - against American requests - to trade with China. By the late 1950's and early 1960's, however, American and Australian policies had converged. Foreign Minister Casey's attempts to persuade Cabinet notwithstanding, "Australia throughout this period was unwilling to take any diplomatic initiatives on the sensitive issue of the recognition of Communist China, which by the late 1 9 5 0 's appeared to

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