Monday, 17 July

Fine, sun

At 5.00 in the afternoon the former French Air Minister Pierre Cot visited me. He will leave Moscow soon so he came to bid me farewell. He told me as follows. 1) According to his recent contacts with the Soviet side, he thinks deeply that the Soviet Union is sincere in cooperating thoroughly with Britain and the United States. He himself regards this as the best thing. Some French think that France will have an advantage if the Soviet Union and the United States are not in harmony, he thinks they are totally wrong. As if only the Soviet Union can cooperate with the United States then world peace will be possible. If there is peace then France will be able to start rebuilding. 2) The Soviet Union has been quite good to China. When he talked to Foreign Minister Molotov about issues like French interests in the Far East (Annam and so on), Foreign Minister Molotov told him that with regard to issues in the Far East, France needs to negotiate with China and the United States, then these matters can be settled. He also hopes that after the war there will be a strong China to maintain peace in the Far East. 3) According to Cot’s personal observations, after the end of the European war, the Soviet Union must join the war against Japan. I asked him to tell Li Shizeng and Wei Daoming about the various Sino-Soviet and American-Soviet relationships when he arrives in the United States, so that they can know the facts. He will go back to Algeria first, and then to America. When we talked about De Gaulle and I quoted a saying from Mencius, saying that De Gaulle should listen more to his officials and shouldn’t always be imperious to his officials he agreed strongly.