On the black and white television screen, Charles de Gaulle responds to journalists in one of his inimitable press conferences. After an hour devoted to domestic politics, the Head of State returned to the announcement made four days earlier, on January 27, 1964, of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. A major diplomatic turning point. He invokes “the weight of evidence and that of reason”. “Need it be said that, on our part, there is nothing in this decision that involves the slightest approval of the political system that currently dominates China?, specifies the president. France simply recognizes the world as it is. »
This recognition is anything but obvious. When the communist troops seized power and Mao Zedong proclaimed, on 1er October 1949, the People’s Republic of China, Paris and Washington wonder about the policy to follow. Until then, they recognized the government of Chiang Kai-shek, forced into a withdrawal which would prove definitive on the island of Taiwan. The requisitions of the premises of the American embassy in Beijing, but also those of the center for sinological studies at the University of Paris, in mid-January 1950, by Maoist soldiers, in any case closed the debate. Others did not make the same choice: from the start, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the United Kingdom diplomatically recognized the new power, without however sending an ambassador to Beijing.
Other events make the establishment of diplomatic ties impossible. In January 1950, China was the first country to recognize communist Vietnam at war against colonial France. At the beginning of the summer of that same year, the Korean War broke out, to date the only direct conflict between the United States and China, in which France was involved since it sent a battalion. Later, Maoist China would support the Algerians’ fight for independence, once again placing itself in opposition to Paris.
Mythified decision
But everything changed at the start of the following decade. Having emerged, not without humiliation, from its two colonial conflicts, France is no longer considered by Mao as an Asian power. Furthermore, from 1963, Charles de Gaulle did not hide his skepticism regarding Washington’s desire to intensify the war in Vietnam. The hero of Free France wants to have a say in world affairs and therefore escape from the logic of East-West blocs. Like Mao Zedong, who, for his part, quickly distanced himself from his big Soviet brother: the Grand Helmsman described the de-Stalinization carried out by Nikita Khrushchev from 1956 as revisionist, then, in 1962, accused the Russian leader of having given in by fear of American imperialists in the Cuban missile crisis. Like Paris, which carried out its first nuclear tests in 1960, Beijing, another emerging atomic power, is opposed to the treaty limiting atmospheric tests on which Washington and Moscow agree.
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