Friday, 17 March
Light snow
The German broadcast said that Minister Song has resigned from the chairmanship of the Bank of China. Vice President H.H. Kung will take his place.
Two articles in the current issue of War and Working Class are worth paying attneition to. One is on Japan, the article saying that Japan is in difficulty and will soon be defeated. Recently the Soviet Union has started to express its opinion towards Japan more clearly, and from this we can extract proof. The other one was on the second war zone. The article stated that although the Soviet Union knows truly that Britain and the United States will stick to the agreement at Tehran to open the second war zone, a section of British and Americans still reckon that the second war zone of the West is the beginning of a long term war. Even Lord Halifax emphasised this in his speech this month. It is known that landing on the western coast will be difficult and substantial sacrifice will be necessary. But if there is no sacrifice, the war will be prolonged and be advantageous for the enemy and in turn the Allies’ sacrifice will be much greater. This seemed to be a warning to Britain and the United States that they shouldn’t use landing in Italy as a perfunctory policy. This is the first time the Soviet Union has expressed its suspicion regarding the British and American second war zone following the Tehran Conference. Recently Walter Lippmann published an article in American newspapers, saying that if Britain and the United States do not try their best in Europe militarily and aren’t ready to make more sacrifices, their political bargaining power in world politics will be diminished. This was not a hollow remark.
At noon I studied Russian.
Yesterday, I received a telegram from our Embassy in Britain, saying that Counsellor Chen Weicheng had had a car accident in the middle of January. He was severely injured and was staying in hospital. No wonder I got no reply to my telegram asking him to buy books and other things. Tomorrow morning the British Embassy messenger will go back to London, so I asked him to take letters to Qian Tai and Tan Baoshen (譚葆慎) asking them to buy the things for me.
Liu Kai sent me a list of the food stuffs he bought for us. Apart from some sheep -tongues and ox-tongues, there is no other meat and the doctor has advised me, due to my arthritis, that I should eat more meat, but no fish. The black market price of pork here is 600 rubles per kg (US$50), which I can hardly afford. Recently, when we invited guests for banquets, we needed at least 5 kg of meat each time, and merely for this we had to spend 3,000 rubles. So, I talked to Shaozhou and Jingchen, and for a long term calculation I will ask Chengyong to go to Iran once to buy food stuffs, which it will be worth doing.