Thursday, 30 September

The telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with regard to the transportation instructions arrived. What I was instructed to talk to Mikoyan about was the same as I proposed. Today Shaozhou reported in a group meeting. In his report, he said he met two American military officers at Lanzhou heading for Tibet. One of them was the grandson of Leo Tolstoy. (He was naturalised in the United States.). They said as follows. 1) Britain’s power in Tibet is minimal. 2) Tibetan leaders adopted a closed-door policy 3) China should not try to use force towards Tibet 4) China should try to send more well-educated and intelligent people there, and set up more schools on the border in order to teach Tibetan children, so that they could reform themselves slowly.  They needed to see some evidence of military force, such as flying one or two airplanes overhead just as a warning. Because the Tibetans hated the Muslim military officers in border provinces, if there was anything we needed to relay to Tibetans, we should not ask Muslim military officers like Ma Bufang (馬步芳)[1]. This point is worth studying.

Military Attache Guo said yesterday that the American Embassy’s Counsellor asked him for lunch. They talked about the leader of the American Communist party, probably William Foster, making a broadcast in New Jersey, saying that the Allies should not ask the Soviet Union, after the defeat of Germany, to join the fight against Japan. The Allies should also not ask to use Soviet bases to bombard Japan Proper. They were very surprised about this, and suspected it was an idea from the Soviet Union, and this would arouse American misunderstanding towards the Soviet Union. It is a great pity. The representative of the American military delegation, General Deane, also told Military Attache Guo that the Soviet Union had recently concentrated the trucks at the Sino-Soviet border which the United States allocated to it.

[1] Ma Bufang (1903-1975) was a militarist in Northwest China. He was a Muslim.