チャイナ・ディファレンシャル緩和問題をめぐってのアイゼンハワー政権の対応

1950年代の国際政治

抄録

This paper aims to elucidate how the Eisenhower Administration responded to the China Differential issue with an extensive use of recently declassified materials. In September 1952 the China Committee (CHINCOM) was established to coordinate the trade embargo against Communist China. From its beginning trade controls against Communist China had been considerably more comprehensive than those applied against the USSR and Eastern Europe. The gap between them substantially increased in August 1954 when the COCOM countries agreed to a major reduction in trade control against the USSR and Eastern Europe. This gap was called the “China Differential.”
After the Geneva summit in July 1955, CHINCOM participating countries including Britain, France, and Japan started to ask the United States to either reduce the CHINCOM controls or eliminate the China Differential. Against their mounting pressures, the United States government managed to forestall a showdown with other participating countries of CHINCOM by postponing the Consultative Group meeting. However, President Eisenhower did not display his strong leadership in solving the China Differential issue and instead he left the handling of that issue in the hands of bureacrats. Because of both Ike's lack of presidential leadership and conflicting views among concerned agencies of the U. S. government, the Economic Defense Advisory Committee(EDAC), a sub-organization of the Council on Foreign Economic Policy, often faced serious difficulties in reaching a bureaucratic consensus over the issue of reducing the China differential in the process of reviewing both the economic defense policy and the U. S. negotiating position. Bureacrats were reluctant to make extensive concessions to the CHINCOM participating countries' demands of reducing the diffrential. The bureaucratic reviewings always resulted in only minor concessions. Such reluctant postures of the United States government increased frustations among CHINCOM participating countries. When the mulitlateral negotiation began at the Paris meeting of CHINCOM in May 1957, the U. S. government found herself to be isolated. What the Eisenhower Administration finally obtained after their two-year struggle to maintain the multilateral trade embargo control against Communist China was the United Kingdom's decision to eliminate the China Differential on 27 May.