Friday, 26 May

Fine, sun

Eden gave a speech after the British Parliament had finished discussing diplomacy. The content of the speech was as follows. 1) Britain has cooperated with the United States. 2) There are numerous traditional suspicions with regard to British differences of opinion with the Soviet Union, and honestly speaking the difficulties are many, but they still need to cooperate. 3) Strengthening of assistance to China. 4) He talked about the principles of world peace organisation. a) It should be given force as back-up in order to avoid any future war. b) The cooperation of the Four Powers serves as the foundation and also tries to take in other countries. c) Should be flexible. d) Should need the cooperation of other countries, and he has raised these principles and discussed them with the United State, the Soviet Union and China. With regard to Germany and Japan, they should be deactivated to the extent that they cannot act aggressively again. It also said in the speech that the British are unwilling to accept the autocracy of a certain country, this is also true towards its friendly states. The whole speech seemed to be quite harsh towards the Soviet Union.

The broadcast from Britain also said, on the several policies our Government declared, including freedom of criticism towards the people’s government, political reform as well, solving the community price problem and others. As a matter of fact our country is now in a severe situation, it should try its best to reform immediately, otherwise it only has the empty name of a strong country and other strong countries will no respect us. Our prospects will be bleak.

In the morning, I studied Russian grammar covering the participle, active-present past, passive-present past. They are more than their English counterparts.

In the afternoon, Counsellor Liu went to the Soviet Foreign Trade Section and asked them to transport 2,000 lorries to China but they declined. With regard to using the route for transportation, they made a lot of nasty comments. All in all they were not sincere about it. They just blamed the commodity price on our side for not accommodating them. Dealings with the government in the Soviet Union are extremely difficult.