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Memorandum of Conversation, by the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (Grew)
The Chinese Minister, Mr. Liu Chieh, called on me this morning to say that Mr. Chang Kia-Ngau, head of the Chinese aviation group, had now returned to Washington, but the group was still not ready to continue the conversations since replies had not yet been received from Chungking in response to inquiries cabled by Mr. Chang both before and after his recent talk with Mr. Berle. The Minister said he assumed that there was no great urgency in proceeding with the conversations, but I replied that we desired to get along with them as rapidly as possible and hoped that there would not be too long a delay before our next meeting.
The Minister then inquired whether we had reached an agreement with the Russians, to which I replied that up to the present our talks had been of a purely exploratory nature in an effort to clarify the various points on our agenda. I said that we expected to meet with the Russians again this week and that, of course, we would be glad eventually to inform the Chinese group of the results of our talks.