Tuesday, 6 April

British Embassy Counsellor Baggalay invited me to lunch to talk about transportation matters. He told me that with regard to this matter, if it were not for General Stilwell telling the American Foreign Office that the Chinese government was not keen on transporting things via this route, the American Government would long ago have sent the trucks, and the route would had been long opened. He advocated that we should make an agreement with the Soviet side, saying that all things carried in the first 1,000 trucks were all Chinese, and should not give 40% to the Soviet Union. I asked him to ask the Indian side how long it would take to assemble the trucks, and then the trucks and goods would be carried by the train. He agreed to do so immediately. I also asked him to try to increase the quantity of the material that the Indian-Iran route could transport. He replied that the opening of the route was solely for Chinese transportation. If our trucks have not yet arrived the British side would not want to use other trucks they got from elsewhere to transport things for the Soviet Union. The amount of goods the British promised to transport for the Soviet Union in Iran had already been agreed. If the Chinese side couldn’t get any advantage from it, there was no point in Britain sacrificing transportation in other places, relocating trucks from elsewhere to help transport things for the Soviet Union.

In the afternoon I went to see the soviet Union’s Vice Foreign Trade Committee Director Zotov. He had been the Minister to Finland and was proficient in French. He was quite friendly and was very agreeable towards China. We talked about cultural cooperation at length. Counsellor Liu said Mr. Zotov had been the Soviet Minister to Finland and was very friendly with Ambassador Shao. He was very pleasant towards China.