Friday, 25 February

Snow, sun

This morning the German broadcast said that there was a big famine in Guangdong last year, and more than a million people died of starvation. In some cases whole families died and many more sold their children as slaves to survive. ThIS was to be expected. This type of disaster is brought about by the German and Japanese warlords.

The British Embassy sent me the full text of Churchill’s speech. It is slightly different from the British broadcast. In the last paragraph, it clearly states that at the Tehran Conference it was decided to use all the army, navy and air force strength to attack Germany in the spring and summer of this year. In other words, it was to open the second war zone now. In this way, the time is not far away.

At 6.00 p.m. Counsellors Liu and Chen held a tea party at the Embassy, inviting the British, American, French, Czech and Dutch Embassy heads, their staff and French Minister Garreau talked about what happened in France. He said as follows: 1) France could be divided into three parts. 1) Small farmers. Because they have land they are extremely conservative. 2) Workers. They are extremely left. 3) As for the middle class, wealthy people tend to be Rightists and intellectuals Leftists. With regard to Britain and America, previously they only wanted to support Rightists, while the Soviet Union supported the leftists. De Gaulle was kept in-between and was in difficulty. Recently, the United States has gradually awakened because of the policy failure in supporting Girau and Darlan, so Britain and the United States turned to support neutral elements, and showed goodwill to De Gaulle. Because the ammunitions subsidy and others were from the United States, so he had to contact Britain and the United States, and turned a little bit cold to the Leftists. When the Soviet Union came into an alliance with Germany and made a declaration, the French Communist Party agreed with the Soviet Union about this move, so they completely lost the sympathy of the French, no matter that the rightists and neutralists were against it. So the French Government ordered the dissolution and arrest of Communist leaders. Now there are some 70 Communist members in the parliament and 31 of them are still in North Africa, but they have never joined the French Liberation Committee. The week before last the leader of the French Communist Party suddenly came to see Garreau, saying that he wanted to go to North Africa, and the Party wanted to participate in the work of the French Liberation Committee. Garreau asked De Gaulle’s permission, but De Gaulle declined. According to Garreau’s personal observation, De Gaulle seemed to be under British and French influence, and also the manifestation of the joint declaration against the Communist Party of neutralists and Rightists. This move certainly has had an adverse effect on Soviet-French relations. So his personal work will be quite difficult. 2) With regard to the issue between France and the Commonwealth, he thought that if there are economic link-ups between the various sides, these will benefit everyone. But what he understood as federate, if it means mutually organising into a big group and cooperating with the Soviet Union to maintain European peace, France will certainly agree. But if it is to guard against the Soviet Union, France will certainly oppose and not join it because if this thing goes like this then a third World War will certainly happen in Europe, and France will bear the blunt because of geographical proximity. 3) I talked about Britain drifting towards the path of Socialism, and not being more advanced than the United States, and the American capitalists feeling that their status is faltering, they have no choice but to make one last struggle in this election, so they have attacked Roosevelt quite severely. What the Soviet Union said was manipulated by them and said they did it for the goodness of the world’s future. The Soviet side should be extremely prudent and not cause Roosevelt to lose the election, or out of which the isolationist capitalists will then rise again. He quite agreed with me. He is very close to the Soviets, so I hope that he can help in urging the Soviet side to be more prudent and this will indirectly be for the good of the Soviet Union.