Highlights a joint statement and an economic aid agreement between China and Nepal, along with discussions on the Chinese and Indian premiers' forthcoming meeting. It also addresses the Indonesian government's efforts to resolve the status of overseas Chinese and the challenges encountered by repatriated Chinese nationals. Updates on U.S.-China diplomatic engagements include China's firm stance on judicial sovereignty over espionage-related cases involving American individuals, and adjustments in China's oil industry management policies.

This document summary was generated by an artificial intelligence language model and was reviewed by a Wilson Center staff member.

Nehru briefs the Provincial Premiers about internal and external developments. Nehru highlights the situation in China and states that the communists could soon take power in the whole of China. He speculates how this will affect other regions.

In June 1938 Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), a Indian National Congress (INC) leader, one of the earliest INC members calling for full independence in 1927, and the main responsible for INC’s foreign relations, took a ship to Europe. This trip was not a first for India’s inaugural prime minister (1947-1964) to be. Already in 1905 he had left India to enroll at the elite British boarding school of Harrow, going on to study at Cambridge and work as a lawyer in London before returning home in 1912. And the last time he had sailed was in 1935, staying until 1936 as the INC representative in meetings with fellow Asian and increasingly also African anti-imperialists in Britain and Europe. Sure, by then the League against Imperialism (LAI), whose Comintern-organized foundational conference Nehru had attended in 1927, was defunct. (For the LAI see the 1927 document on Messali Hadj in this collection.) Even so, Nehru continued to see his secularist Indian nation-statist goals within an international leftist-anti-imperialist and now anti-fascist framework and web, as Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020) argues.

Hence, when on the ship en route to Europe in 1938 he received an invitation from Egypt’s leading nationalist wafd party and agreed to meet their leaders. Having been in contact with Egyptian nationalists before, a story told in Noor Khan’s Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), and having detailed their anti-imperialism in Glimpses of World History (1934), he saw the wafd as INC’s appropriately leading anti-imperialist counterpart in Egypt. Sure, in confidential INC memoranda, he criticized the wafd’s insufficient attention to the masses, especially the peasants, which cost them an election in early 1938, he thought; indeed, the wafdists were liberal nationalists whereas Nehru was a leftist nationalist. Nonetheless, sitting down with the wafd and exchanging views about world politics and anti-imperialist strategies was called for, in his and the wafd’s view, at a time when fascism was rising and Britain continued to rule India and be very present in Egypt. Reproduced in the massive compilation Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, this text is a letter by Nehru, the first to the INC while he was on the ship en route to London.

Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Abdyl Kellezi discuss revisionism, relations with the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the USA.

In this document, N. S. Khrushchev provides wide-ranging comments on various geopolitical and diplomatic issues. He criticizes the US for holding onto outdated alliances like Taiwan, emphasizing the need to normalize relations and reduce tensions globally. Khrushchev discusses Middle Eastern instability, particularly in Iran, warning against U.S. interference and emphasizing self-determination for colonized nations. He also addresses disarmament, arguing that military bases are a source of tension and advocating for a phased withdrawal of troops and arms control measures. Additional topics include the complexities of summit diplomacy, Lend-Lease repayment disputes, and his correspondence with world leaders such as Macmillan, De Gaulle, and Nehru, stressing the importance of aligning messages to maintain good relations.

This document summary was generated by an artificial intelligence language model and was reviewed by a Wilson Center staff member.

Zhou and Bhutto discuss the Second Asian-African Conference, as well as the potential for a rapprochement between China and the Philippines.

An intelligence report that the fuel core of the Canadian-Indian Reactor (CIR) at Trombay was being changed every six months raised questions about India’s nuclear objectives: a six-month period was quite short for “normal research reactor operations,” but it was the optimum time for using the CIR’s spent fuel for producing weapons grade plutonium. According to INR, India had taken the “first deliberate decision in the series leading to a nuclear weapon,” which was to have “available, on demand, unsafeguarded weapons-grade plutonium or, at the least, the capacity to produce it.”

Nehru gives a detailed report on his visit to China and Indo-China. He first gives a summary of the issues and topics he covered in discussions in China with Zhou En-Lai and Mao, which covered a broad range of subjects including China's Five Year Plan, and various foreign policy issues. Nehru then describes his visit to Indochina, where he speaks with Ho Chi Minh (five days after he takes control of Hanoi) in North Vietnam, and also tours South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Choi Duk Shin reports on President Diem's return from India, Japanese Prime Minister Kishi's upcoming tour of Southeast Asia, and recent Vietnamese events.

Zhou Enlai and Pakistani Ambassador Ahmed discuss the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir, the likelihood of a military conflict in the region, and the possibility that such a conflict could be used by the United States to its advantage.