Thursday, 6 July

Fine, sun

In the morning I went with Chengyong and Jibang to visit the big department store. It was back in business again three days ago, all kinds of goods were there, but the prices were so high we could not afford them. For example a badly-made glass cost 40 rubles. A square cotton floral white tablecloth cost more than a thousand rubles. A small slice of cake cost 45 rubles. A very ordinary pillow cost 120 rubles. A pack of 20 locally-made cigarettes 120 rubles, and the cheapest ones 80 rubles. Only the price of an electric iron (quite good) was reasonable, which cost 600 rubles. I asked Chengyong to buy one. The price of stationery was not too high.  The Soviet Government has reopened such shops for the following reasons. 1) To absorb rubles. 2) To crack down on black market prices. According to what I have seen, it was so crowded and the black market prices were halved. It seems that this policy is quite effective.

Churchill reported in the British Parliament the extent of the damage in Britain from German flying bombs, saying that in the past three weeks, more than 2,700 flying bombs have been dropped on Britain and they have killed 2,752 people and wounded 8,000. Based on this statistic of a flying bomb each time only killing one person and always missing the target, it did not hurt. The German side uses this sort of ammunition which has no military value. This is enough to see how cruel the German people are. It is also enough to see that Germany senses defeat is imminent so it took a gamble. This made the old British imperialists feel the pain, and no longer assume Germany belonged to the same race as Britain and tried to maintain its strength to offset others. (Soviet Union)

The German broadcast said that people in Shaoguan and Yingde have evacuated and the enemy has advanced to the North from Guangzhou.

I studied Russian from 8.00 until 10.00 in the evening.