Tuesday, 28 September

The Czechoslovakian Embassy First-Class Secretary said that the President of Czechoslovakia, Benes, had scheduled a visit to the Soviet Union, and is prepared to sign a certain treaty with it. But the British Government figured that to sign this kind of treaty opposed the British-Soviet agreement, so it was opposed. (Probably this meant before the end of the war the Allies should not sign political treaties unilaterally with other countries, so as to prevent the mistake of signing secret treaties before the war.) So Benes would not now come to the Soviet Union.

This afternoon Counsellor Liu met Secretary Litvinov. From his tone, it seems he isn’t happy with the Xinjiang authority. He also said that the Sino-Soviet friendship had to be achieved by both sides and could not merely depend on one side. It seems that it has already decided that Eden will come to the Soviet Union.

Hu Shijie met the acting Director of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. According to the Acting Director with regard to transportation, he reckoned issues such as the transportation fee, and the fee for food and lodging on returning to Xinjiang were all technical problems, and he would provide proposals for them shortly. His tone did not seem to be one of refusal. But after two weeks Mikoyan was still unable to decide on a day to meet with me. I supposed there were two reasons. 1) Using a technical problem to delay. 2) Because the Generalissimo said in a recent speech that he was not going to use force to deal with the CCP, therefore they had changed their policies accordingly. All in all, Soviet policies towards foreign countries change all the time. If there is any change, no matter how big or how small, everything follows and changes accordingly. Therefore yesterday, Ambassador Kerr told me that to work in the Soviet Union, one had to completely change his attitude and way of handling things. Ambassador Kerr is already over fifty years old, it is very difficult for him to accept fundamental changes. What he said is true. I had no choice but to cable the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about what the Ministry of Foreign Trade said. I also said I was unable to meet up with Mikoyan.

Wu Liquan sent me a telegram, saying the price for the properties in Hami was settled. The total was 2,000,000 in Xinjiang currency. We could sign the contract shortly and the Soviet army would leave completely. According to Shaozhou, he said the oil refinery at Dushanzhi and the airplane factory machines had been evacuated, and only a few staff left behind. The negotiations with regard to the peroperty sale price would soon be settled and then they would leave too. One can see the Soviet attitude towards Xinjiang is still friendly. I immediately replied to Liquan, and told him a little bit about the situation here.

Shaozhou also said that on his way there he talked to the Soviet people. What he sensed was as follows: 1) He said the Soviet people reckoned that Japan was their enemy. They were good to the Chinese and also showed their admiration for our War of Resistance. 2) They were grateful for the help of Britain and the United States and believed that if it were not for their assistance the result of the war would be very difficult to predict. 3) A certain senior engineer of the airplane factory at Dihua told him that this February he received an order recalling him back to Moscow as the factory needed to be expanded. Later it was abolished and it is a great pity. According to this, when I first came here, the Soviet Union truly wanted to cooperate with us. After June and July the change happened. It is a great pity.