The United Nations and China
The joint resolution on China introduced by the United States into the Political Committee of the General Assembly is non- committal to the point of being evasive. It could hardly have been otherwise, and its four clauses, which do little more than reaffirm with much piety the old principle of the Open Door, are probably sound tactics in a situation of some delicacy and more unreality. That Russia has injured the Chinese Republic, with whom she signed a treaty of friendship, by violating that treaty is indisputable ; but it is equally indisputable that meanwhile the Chinese Republic has disappeared, to the regret of very few Chinese. What is often (not very logically) called the logic of events will in time resolve what appears at the moment to be an impasse. For the present, two specific objectives, discernible through a fog of complications, will recommend themselves to all who want the United Nations Organisation to achieve its purposes. The first is the withdrawal from the fugitive Kuomintang regime of its rights—which have long been forfeit de facto—to represent the Chinese people in diplomatic and international contexts. This objective is not difficult to attain. The second objective is so to amend the constitution of U.N.O. that China loses her permanent seat on the Security Council, for which, whatever her form of government, she is at this stage of her political development wholly unfitted. But this step seems to be well outside the sphere of practical politics, since any such amendment can only be effected by a unanimous vote, and Russia is hardly likely to agree to what would mean a loss of face for Communist China. So
the outlook is obscure and unpromising, the only hopeful feature in it being that the Chinese people (who after all are what chiefly matter) arc suffering no material inconvenience from an inter- national deadlock of whose existence few of them are aware and whose nature still fewer comprehend.
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