Oral International Agreement and China's Relevant Practice

Abstract

Oral agreements still exist in international practice today. This paper first discusses the nature of agreements in oral form, then turns to introduce relevant practice of China. Theoretically, oral agreements should be regarded as a kind of treaty, although these were not covered by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. In practice, oral agreements were relatively rare but still had their peculiar utility. The “Zhou Enlai–Kosygin Agreement” was a typical example of oral agreement, which is helpful for us both in observing oral agreements in practice and in better understanding the Chinese practice of treaty-making. It shows that the choice of form of agreement depends not only on the rules of the law of treaties, but also on the circumstances of conclusion and other factors.