I warmly welcome our friends and extend a hearty welcome to you.

In Japan, aside from the pro-American monopoly capitalists and the militarist warlords, the broad masses of the people are our true friends. You too will feel that the Chinese people are your true friends. There are true friends and false friends, but through practice one can see clearly who are true friends and who are false friends. Some people do not understand why the Chinese and Japanese, who fought each other in the past, are now so close. They do not realize that the Japanese people are different from the monopoly capitalists and the militarist warlords.

At present, not only are you oppressed, but we are oppressed as well. We have no right to speak in the international arena.

The Japanese government has entered the United Nations, but we have not yet. U.S. imperialism occupies your territory of Okinawa and has set up military bases in your country; your country is in a state of semi-occupation. Our Taiwan is under the control of U.S. imperialism. It is U.S. imperialism that has compelled our two peoples, the Chinese and the Japanese, to unite. Both our peoples suffer from the oppression of U.S. imperialism; we share a common plight, and so we have united.

I hear that you are very happy to have come to Beijing. Here, we warmly welcome you. But over there, the situation is different. The responsibility for this does not lie with you, but with America’s friends in Japan, that is, the Japanese monopoly capitalist clique. In China, too, there are those who oppose you, namely the Chiang Kai-shek clique. There is an old Chinese saying: "Things of a kind come together, people of a mind fall into groups."