Sunday, 17 February

I studied Italian on my own.

In the afternoon Yang Xizong (楊錫宗)[1] came to talk with me. He said as follows:

• Originally T.F. Tsiang intended to organize a liberal party, but Hu Shih did not join so it was unsuccessful. Firstly, as Hu is a scholar, and his organization skills are not very good. Secondly, Hu advocates the ism of complete economic freedom, which is totally different from the opinion of Tsiang. Thirdly, Hu also knows that in the future the composition of the elements of the Party would be complicated and not easy to control. Therefore, Tsiang has abandoned such an idea (in organizing a party).
• On returning to Taiwan, T.F. Tsiang was in the meetings of the Reconstruction Committee; he had different opinions with other members. He had verbal conflicts with them and it ended unhappily. Fortunately, Chen Cheng did the round-up job for him and he was barely able to leave gracefully.
• They all thought that although Taiwan is making progress, the progress is simply not as adequate as expected.
• Tsiang wanted to mobilize overseas comrades, and he wanted to have my opinion. I replied that our country had deteriorated to such extent, it was already not strong enough even if we united to oppose Communism. If we further divided our power in opposing Communism and Chiang Kai-shek at the same time, there would not be the slightest hope of success. Therefore, I gave two suggestions to T.F. Tsiang; a) that he should no longer embrace the idea of organizing a party, b) that the effort he put in his work in the United Nations in the past three years had made the Taiwan side have substantial trust in him. He could use this trust to try his best to press Taiwan to make various reforms. Tsiang should not feel disappointed. Yang strongly agreed with what I said. He said he would urge T.F. Tsiang accordingly.

The New York Times reported that the American government was now studying to adopt three ways to help Taiwan more actively.

• It would give more power to the Seventh Fleet to defend against the CCP’s invasion to Taiwan.
• It would order the Seventh Fleet that it should not retard the Kuomintang army from attacking the Mainland.
• It would notify the Nationalist Government that though the Korean War was over it would still not allow the CCP to attack Taiwan.

[1] Yang Xizong was a Cantonese architect.