Thursday, 14 September

Dull

The Soviet Foreign Office sent Commissioner Litvinov to China. Probably he was to study the actual situation in China. Litvinov is quite friendly towards China. Perhaps the Soviet side want to thoroughly adjust the Sino-Soviet relation. I cabled the Foreign Ministry.

The Soviet Union announced a truce signed with Romania. The Soviet side only demanded compensation of US$ 3 billion. I did not think it was too much.

In the evening Shaozhou invited us to a buffet to bid farewell to the daughters of the Yugoslavian Ambassador. The sisters will return to their own country to work soon. People in the American Embassy told Shaozhou that Counsellor Hamilton was recalled to the United States and this was because he could not cooperate with Ambassador Harriman. Originally, they shared residences, but later when Ambassador Harriman came back from the United States Hamilton moved out. Probably he represented the Foreign Office while Ambassador Harriman was from the White House. These personal complications and difficulties are the same everywhere. The Dutch Counsellor told me that because he is proficient in Russian he always sat in the gardens alone and talked to the Soviet people. He learnt about what Soviet people thought and their criticisms of the government and society. For instance, one could see what happened from two jokes the Soviet people told him. 1) During the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill went out together in the same car, when it passed a small bridge, it just happened a mother cow was standing in the middle of the bridge and did not move. Thus the car could not go forward. Three of them talked and because Churchill could talk the best they asked him to talk to the mother cow and ask it to move. Churchill talked to the cow for a long time but to no avail. Then it was Roosevelt’s turn to talk. Roosevelt reasoned with the mother cow, but it yielded no result either. Then two of them asked Stalin for help. Stalin came out and whispered a few words in the mother cow’s ear and suddenly the mother cow rushed away. They were so surprised that Stalin could be so competent. Stalin replied that it was a simple matter. I told her if she did not leave immediately I would send her to a collective farm.  2) A girl looked for a husband. She asked the matchmaker to find one. The matchmaker first introduced her to an engineer with a house having three rooms, and two sets of food coupons. She said if the girl married him she would have a nice and easy life. The girl refused and asked for a better one. Then the match maker introduced her to a division commander with a house having four rooms. He had plenty of food and a car. The girl still refused. The matchmaker tried her best and she was able to come up with a Vice-Minister with a house having six rooms, three sets of food coupons and a car, as well as a dacha. Yet the girl still hesitated. The matchmaker could not bear it anymore and angrily said that the girl really thought that she was so beautiful she could marry a warehouse guard because recently the warehouse guards have been stealing material from the warehouses and they were the richest people in the society. It was just like our drivers in the Yunnan-Burma Road several years ago. Many people envied their jobs.