Comments on a Book
(21 June 1960)

Comrades Shaoqi, Enlai, Xiaoping[1]: Read it. Very interesting, a must-read book.[2]

Mao Zedong
21 June

1. NATO—Past, Present and Future; 2. Talks with Mr. Khrushchev in Moscow;
3. History Before the End of the Second World War in May 1945; 4. The Post-War Years;
5. The Substantive Issues of the Geneva Foreign Ministers' Conference. The main arguments of the book are:
Although the West won the war against Germany, it lost politically to the Soviet Union, primarily due to errors in American military thinking and deep-seated contradictions between the U.S. and Britain; the West has suffered severe defeats in the post-war global struggle with the East; the West must pay attention to external developments, as future struggles have shifted to political, economic, and ideological realms; the West must change its strategy and recognize certain "realities" in East-West relations; winning a "friendly China" is one of the two major political objectives of the West;
what the West needs most in the current struggle is unity and leadership, and the institutions of the North Atlantic Alliance must be thoroughly reformed; the Soviet Union adheres to a policy of peace; in East-West relations, the West Berlin issue should be resolved first, adopting a gradual approach and reaching larger agreements through small accords; the West must change its strategy in order to achieve "victory through peace."

--- Notes

[1] Xiaoping, i.e., Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee.
[2] Refers to the internal reading material *A Sober Approach—A Study of East-West Relations*, translated by the Beijing Translation Society and published by World Knowledge Publishing House in March 1960. The book includes two lectures delivered by Montgomery at Oxford University during the 1959 East-West Foreign Ministers' Conference and several articles published in the London *Sunday Times*: