27. Editorial Note
Replying to a question at a press conference on the French decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China, French President Charles de Gaulle reviewed the reasons for France’s action. De Gaulle then raised the relationship between China and Southeast Asia as follows:
“In fact, there is in Asia no political reality, notably with regard to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, or to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, or to Korea or Soviet Russia or Japan, etc., which does not concern or affect China. There is, in particular, neither a war nor a peace imaginable on this continent without China’s being implicated in it. Thus it would be absolutely impossible to envision, without China, a possible neutrality agreement relating to the Southeast Asian States, in which States for so many reasons, we French feel a very particular and cordial interest—a neutrality which, by definition, must be accepted by all, guaranteed on the international level, and which would exclude [Page 50] both armed agitations supported by any one among them in one or another of the States, and the various forms of external intervention; a neutrality that, indeed, seems, at the present time, to be the only situation compatible with the peaceful existence and progress of the peoples concerned.”
For a larger extract of De Gaulle’s answer, see American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1964, pages 873–875.