Saturday, 11 September

Hamilton invited me to lunch and also Admiral Standley has cancelled his trip to Siberia. After lunch, we went to watch a film.

This morning Committee Member Hu went to see the acting Director of Foreign Trade. He said the trucks in India came before all the problems were settled. It seemed to him that we wanted to make it a fait accompli. Also he raised the price of goods and other questions. It seemed he wanted to drag out the issue. At the same time, the British Embassy has also forwarded the reply from the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Molotov, to Ambassador Kerr with regard to this matter. Molotov replied that the Chinese Government hasn’t been granted agreement from the Soviet Union, so they couldn’t accept them. The development of this matter is puzzling. As for the trucks, we already informed them two months ago, and they never mentioned anything about us not being able to receive them. With regard to the questions we discussed, the Soviet Union didn’t mention what should be handled first before transportation could start. As for the price of merchandise, they have not raised the question until now. From this we can see that the Soviet side is not really sincere about it. In the beginning, they agreed with Britain to open this route because they wanted to increase the transportation of materials to the Soviet Union. Recently the Soviet Union was also afraid that opening the transportation would have a bad effect on Soviet-Japan relations. Also the Soviet Union was not satisfied with Britain as the second war zone was not yet opened, and I was not clear about the internal situation in China. All these things will affect Soviet attitude towards this matter.