Monday, 14 January

Fine

I studied Italian on my own.  In the evening, Mr. Liu Kai invited us to a banquet at Xin Zhonghua restaurant.

General Alphonse Pierre Juin made a statement to the press in Washington that French military spending in Vietnam was over one thousand million US dollars per year. The deaths of military officers exceeded the number of soldiers being trained in the French army institutes every year. The French army had 126,000 soldiers in Vietnam, but the Chinese Communists had gathered 350,000 people at the Sino-Vietnamese border. (American side estimated to be 250,000 people.) So, if the Chinese Communists joined the war, Britain and the United States had to deploy their navy and air forces to join. He thought that after the end of the Korean War, it would be possible for Chinese Communists to join the Vietnam War.