Friday, 8 February

I learnt Italian on my own.

I received a letter from Zhuohui, saying that Huiming had given birth to a boy on the fourth of this month. I was really very happy. I immediately wrote to him back and sent $US100 for him for the one-month birthday of the baby. I wrote to reply Zhu Jiahua, Wu Shangying and Xie Weilin.

I went shopping in Paris with Kitty.

Truman raised formally in Congress that he would dispatch George F. Kennan to be ambassador to the Soviet Union. Liu Kai told me that during a United Nations meeting of the General Assembly, someone had asked the Soviet representative, Malik, why it was that the Moscow Broadcasting Station had heavily criticized Kennan, but at the same time the Soviet Union also agreed for Kennan to be appointed as their ambassador. Malik replied that “one American is just as bad as the other”.

Several days ago, Chen Jingcheng had talked to me about this subject. He said that the atmosphere in Soviet Union and its attitude towards Kennan had been so bad. It was meaningless to go there once more, and there would be no achievement. This was completely a matter for personnel promotion and was really unworthy. I also thought so.