India. The British government’s conduct in India is reactionary and short-sighted. Its policy is leading directly to the rise of oppositional and revolutionary movements. India is on the brink of a campaign of ‘civil disobedience’. Gandhi undoubtedly remains the most influential of all Indian leaders.

China. Jiang Jieshi has taken a firm stance. There’s stalemate at the front. The Japanese are unable to advance, and the Chinese are unable to flush them out of their strongholds because of a shortage of tanks, artillery, planes, etc. The partisan movement is spread wide, but slow to take effect. Jiang Jieshi faces two main dangers. (A) The threat to the Chinese dollar. The stabilization fund has dried up and the dollar may plummet at any moment. Meanwhile, the Chinese dollar is more than just a currency; it is the symbol of China’s unity. Thanks to the dollar, the population of the regions ‘occupied’ by the Japanese can pay taxes and duties to Jiang Jieshi. (B) The aggravation of relations between the Guomindang and the Communist Party. This may lead to open armed conflict. Jiang Jieshi’s aides-de-camp bear the brunt of the blame for this (although he himself is quite anti-communist too). According to Cripps’s observations, there are many corrupt elements among this group. When he was in the United States, Cripps tried to sound out the possibility of augmenting the stabilization fund. It seems that the Americans may be prepared to go half-and-half with England (up to 15 million pounds is required in total).

Japan. The country’s economic situation is difficult but far from catastrophic. Cripps talked with Arita,

Hachiro Arita, intermittent Japanese foreign minister, 1936–40.

and his impression is that Japan really fears just one country – the Soviet Union. Arita also outlined provisional conditions of peace with China: (a) recognition of Manzhouguo and the Beijing government; (b) economic preferences for Japan in China; (c) spheres of influence for Japan in some regions, especially those adjoining the USSR; and (d) the conclusion of an anti-Comintern alliance between Japan and China, which is understood as the right to organize a Chinese army under Japanese command against the USSR. Of all these conditions, Arita considers the fourth to be the most important.

USSR. Cripps and his secretary, Geoffrey Wilson,

Geoffrey Masterman Wilson, Stafford Cripps’s secretary; served in the British embassy in Moscow, and the Russian department of the Foreign Office, 1940–45.

flew to the USSR from Chongqing. The weather was so bad that they were forced to stay in Kuibyshev for three days. On the way back, after being flown on a Soviet plane to Chinese territory in Tianjin, Cripps had to travel more than two thousand kilometres by car. But it all turned out fine. Cripps liked our pilots and was pleased with the attention accorded to him in the Soviet Union. His conversation with C[omrade] Molotov clarified a great deal for him. Cripps was mostly interested in what had gone wrong in the trade negotiations between England and the USSR last autumn, as well as in the prospects for their resumption. He informed C[omrade] Molotov of his impressions of China and asked him in detail about Soviet policy towards China. Cripps spent merely 36 hours in Moscow before heading back to Chongqing. Cripps spoke highly of Clark Kerr,

Archibald Clark Kerr, British ambassador in China, 1938–42, in the USSR, 1942–46, and in the USA, 1946–48.

the British ambassador in China, whom he found to be a progressive fellow with a friendly attitude towards the USSR.