The bill contemplates a course of action which would be an illegal one. It would also be inequitable for the reasons that have been submitted to the committee. Clearly our capacity to pay is far greater than that indicated by our population. And it would be unworkable because the United Nations cannot be expected to adopt such a scale. It could not afford it even if it wished. If we impose the scale unlawfully, the United Nations itself would, in substantial measure, cease to work. It would, as Secretary De Palma has stated, be pushed over the financial brink on which it now teeters.

Now, it teeters on that brink not because of American policy, which, I think, in this regard, has been outstanding. Apart from the very serious failure to pay assessments of the ILO, we have paid our dues. We may be behind for a particular year because of the method of the operation of the Congress, but my understanding is that generally speaking we have paid our dues, if a bit late, quite uniformly, with perhaps the exception of imposing a requirement on the U.N. to use certain currencies which are not easily convertible.

Our record, on the whole, is an excellent one. We should maintain that record as long as we keep membership in the U.N. and we should, in my submission, keep membership as long as the U.N. renders substantial service toward the achievement of its purposes and the welfare of the people of the United States. I think it does that.

That is not for a moment to say that the United Nations does not have severe defects. It reflects many disappointments, but we have no better international organization at the moment. The only way to get one is to make the U.N. a better one, and certainly by destroying its financial prospects, we shall not do that.

Mr. FRASER. Mr. Schwebel, one of the reasons why these bills are being submitted, I think, is the disenchantment which followed the vote on the China question. It would be helpful to me and perhaps to other Members, if you would give your own views as a specialist in international law with respect to the merits of what took place in the U.N. on the China question and how you view the U.S. position.

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to do so.

In my view, the position of the U.S. Government on this issue was correct. I think it would have been in the interests of the United Nations and of the people of China if the island of Taiwan had continued to be represented one way or another; and the only plausible way of achieving that was, in effect, though we didn't so denominate it, to have a two-China policy-one China represented by the Government in Peking, a second China represented by the Government of Taiwan.

One day, as Mr. Kissinger apparently contemplated yesterday in his remarks, those two Governments might unite in a single government. But until those two Governments freely so decide, I think the correct policy is to permit the people on Taiwan to maintain their independence, and retaining representation in the United Nations would have been an important contribution to the achievement of that aim.

So, fundamentally, I think our policy was correct, and I regret that the majority of the General Assembly did not accept that political judgment.

But, in declining to accept the political judgment that was made in Washington, I do not think that the General Assembly's majority acted unlawfully. Perhaps it was inpolitic, but it was not illegal.

The Republic of China, strictly speaking, was not expelled from the United Nations. Rather, a decision was taken that the Government of the People's Republic of China in Peking is the government representative of the State of China, and that the Government on Taiwan is not so representative.

Now, if one looks at the simple facts of which government controls the land area and the people and the resources of what all the world accepts as China, that is not an unreasonable conclusion. It is, of course, true that, under the charter, the expulsion of a state member requires not only a vote of two-thirds but a prior recommendation of the Security Council, and neither was foreseen in this case, though, in fact, the motion disposing of Chinese representation was carried by a two-thirds majority. But it was not a matter viewed by the majority as a question of expulsion of the state member but, as Secretary De Palma has said, of representation of a state already a member.

Now, in the 20 or so years that this issue has been debated in the U.N., it has always been viewed as a question of representation. The United States has always so treated it. The Government of the Republic of China has always so treated it, and so have all other members. To reverse the field at this juncture and treat it not as a question of representation but of, on the other hand, admission of Communist China and, on the other hand, of expulsion of Taiwan is to reverse the field not only late in the game but after the game is over.

We did not argue in the General Assembly this autumn that the question was one of expulsion of a state, and we were right not to argue that. At any rate, it would have been very difficult to argue in view of the history of the case. If, in 1950, this had been argued, and argued all the years subsequently, it would have been an easier case to make out. I won't say there is no basis for the case, but it was not the approach which was fundamentally followed.

Mr. FRASER. Was not the position of the United States complicated by the fact that the Nationalist Government continued to assert the right to exercise authority over all of China?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Absolutely. The Government of the Republic of China, my understanding is, did not treat the question as one of expulsion of a state; rather, it claimed that it was and is the sole government of the State of China and, as such, the only proper representative of the State of China. It accepted the view that the question was and remains one of Chinese representation, but its view is that it is the correct representative and the sole correct representative.

Mr. FRASER. Would not that make it difficult in deciding a representation question-to end up upsetting the boat?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Yes; it was one of the several crosses our policy was obliged to bear, and an even bigger one, Mr. Chairman, I think, was the perception of most U.N. members that Peking would not, in fact, come in if Taiwan remained. This is what Peking had said day and night. I don't know if any of us can know if it is the fact; perhaps Peking does not know it, but, at any rate, this was the policy they had stoutly maintained.

The majority seemed to believe that the policy the United States had proposed would not work for that reason and would require the United Nations to go through still more difficult contortions next year or in a subsequent year. The majority seemed to feel that if Taiwan were accepted, in fact Peking would not take its seat next year or the year after, and that eventually, in the desire to have Peking in the General Assembly, the U.N. would exclude the delegation of Taiwan.

Mr. FRASER. If the U.S. position had prevailed, how many votes would China have cast in the General Assembly?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Well, you put your finger on another complication, because, under the charter, each member of the General Assembly has one vote: article 18 squarely so provides. Therefore, the State of China, the single State of China, could not lawfully have had two votes; that is why I said, at the outset, that our policy, in effect, was a two-China policy, even if we didn't call it that.

We were operating on the assumption, implicit perhaps but actual, that there were two successor states to the single State of China, and each would have one vote in the General Assembly and in other organs of the organization in which they would sit.

Now, we didn't foreclose the possibility that those two states might one day merge into one state again. There are U.N. precedents for a state being succeeded by two successor states, and for two states becoming one state. The latter precedent is illustrated by the merger between Syria and Egypt to constitute the UAR, and then again the seating of Syria without going through the admission process when it broke away from the UAR.

Mr. FRASER. I don't recall this, but did the resolution that was being advanced by the United States provide for separate votes for the two governments?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. It did not expressly do so, but my understanding of its intendment would be that each of the Chinese delegations would have had a separate vote, and each would have been treated in the U.N. by the U.N. as representing distinctive entities, though each doubtless would have maintained its claim that each represented the whole of China. It would have been a confused and awkward situation, there is no doubt of it, and this is one of the difficulties our policy bore.

Mr. FRASER. Would not the fact have been at least some measure to have bypassed the regular procedure for the admission of an additional nation?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Yes; it would have been.

Mr. FRASER. Does the General Assembly, for example, have the authority on its own to admit another nation?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. No. A state applying for admission to the U.N., as you rightly suggest by the terms of your question, must be recommended by the Security Council, a recommendation which is subject to the veto, and approved by the General Assembly. Nevertheless, one can fairly make a distinction between the admission of a state never a member and the seating of a successor state that derives from the territory of a state already a member.

Now, on this, the precedents are mixed, and they didn't uniformly help our case. For example, when India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in 1947, India maintained the membership that India, as

an original member of the United Nations, had. Pakistan applied for membership, and was not delighted to do that; it would have preferred to just be seated; but the Secretary-General took the position-and it was a position of some controversy-that Pakistan should apply for membership as a new state, and it did.

Now, that precedent ran counter to our Chinese position. On the other hand, there were precedents that were more helpful, such as the Syrian one I stated a moment ago.

Mr. FRASER. Syria had not been a member prior to the merger?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Syria had been a member in its own right, so it was not a square precedent; it was of some help, but it was not as helpful as it might have been. There was no doubt that, on the law of the matter, we had an uphill fight, and that is one of the reasons we lost, because the question had been argued over the years in terms of representation; and neither China wanted two Chinas.

It was legally and politically a difficult case, and we failed to carry it not through any want of effort but, I think, essentially not only because of these legal disabilities but because of the perception on the part of the majority that the U.S. formula would not do what they wanted to do, which was to get Peking in. Now, they may have been wrong on that, but we will never know.

Mr. FRASER. One of the results of the position taken by the United States, of course, was to assert to the domestic public the rightness of its position, the fact that there were substantial legal problems, and, as you put it, it was legally an uphill battle for the United States.

There was no way for the people of the United States really to understand that and we paid a fairly high price in terms of ongoing support for the United Nations. In your opinion, is the price worth the battle we have fought?

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Well, I share with you, sir, concern about the public reaction, and I would not say that I am altogether happy with the way in which the vote in the United Nations was played, so to speak, by those having official responsibility. For example there was some loose usage of the term "expulsion" which fed the theory that, in fact, there had been an unlawful expulsion, which did not go through the Security Council.

But I would not go so far as to say that we should never have made an effort to keep Taiwan in. I think it was basically a sensible political judgment, sensible because it is a real loss to the possibilities of Taiwan's maintaining its independence to have been excluded from the U.N.

Over the long pull, in my view, it is going to be much more difficult than otherwise. I think we will see fewer and fewer states maintaining diplomatic relations with Taiwan. We shall hear the Peking delegation in New York chanting day and night that there is only one China, that the U.N. has recognized this, and that Taiwan exists independently only by reason of the intervention of U.S. military and naval power.

I think this argument will have increasing appeal, even in the United States. But I do think that the 14 million people on Taiwan should be able to remain free of Communist rule if they so wish.

So I think the fight was worth making, and I regret we lost it.

Mr. FRASER. Let me just pursue that. Now that the United Nations has determined that there is only one Government of China and that is the Peking Government, Taiwan is left, it seems to me, in a kind of a hiatus; from the Peking point of view, this is part of China, but clearly Peking does not control Taiwan.

It would seem to me that what this may do is to force a new basis for the legitimacy of the Government on Taiwan; that is, their legitimacy before was founded on what was increasingly a fiction, an increasingly transparent fiction in which the people of Taiwan were essentially denied representation in the government. Now, it would seem to me that with this fiction having been, in effect, destroyed by the action of an international body, that there would have to be generated on Taiwan a new basis for legitimacy, that in that process the people of Taiwan may be brought into the political workings of the government. On those grounds and hopefully with the continuation of the mutual security agreement which offers the best prospects for an independent Taiwan-assuming that is what the people want-this process of legitimizing the Government of Taiwan might be speeded up, whereas under a two-China solution, it might have been deferred a considerable length of time.

This is all speculative I realize. I guess your view is that the Taiwanese should have the right to decide their own future, in effect, free of Peking.

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Exactly.

Mr. FRASER. That is my view, too, and that the outcome of the U.S. action may have facilitated that.

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Well, sir, I am really not sure. I have my doubts that it will facilitate it, but we will se.

Mr. FRASER. That is, the disappearance of representation from nations other than Taiwan, it seems to me. was not dependent so much on U.N. action as the leverage that is being exerted by Peking against countries which sought to establish diplomatic relations with Peking. Therefore, the process of isolation, if it does continue on, won't seem so much a result of the U.N. action as from Peking's leverage.

Mr. SCHWEBEL. That may well be. I think the U.N. action, though, is a contribution to the trend away from relations with Taiwan, and I would not underestimate the impact that the views of Peking in New York may have over the longer pull.

Mr. FRASER. Well, I guess we are now speculating about the future, and I recognize the difficulty of pinning it down.

Well, I want to thank you very much for a very helpful statement on this China question and your statement on the proposals to reduce the assessed and voluntary contributions by the United States. I don't have any questions on your statement, because I am largely in agreement with it.

So again I want to thank you very much. You have been very helpful, and I hope we can get some of our colleagues to read the discussions we have provided on the China question, because it seems to me that the reaction to the China vote was not justified, particularly in light of the fact that none of our NATO allies ended up supporting us. For some reason, people don't seem to give any weight to that.

Mr. SCHWEBEL. Mr. Chairman, may I make one comment on the issue before us stimulated by the argument which Congressman Sikes