of these and future differences between the two informal allies, the Albanians subsequently wrote that they "supported China publicly... in the international arena for those stands of the Chinese side which were correct." A constant irritant on the Albanian side was an inability to have regular contacts with the Chinese. Examining Hoxha's two-volume Reflections on China (consisting of extracts from his political diary), Halliday writes that, "If there is a central theme to the whole 1600 pages, it is the problem of deciphering China's actions... In the very first entry... Hoxha writes that in spite of the importance of consulting about 'revisionism', 'up to now, the Chinese have not had any contact at all with us to discuss these things. Were our enemies to know that between us there is no consultation at all about the fight against the modern revisionists, they would be astonished. They would never believe it. But that is how things stand.' ... Hoxha presents the decade and a half of 'alliance' with China as years when Albania had to muzzle itself quite a lot, with the occasional bust-out to signal disapproval of China's actions... The diary is rich in accounts of his attempts to decode both published statements and acts, on the one hand, and (something not so widely known) the private communications of the Chinese to the Albanians which were also in 'code'. In the end, Hoxha is reduced to watching the TV of his hated Yugoslavia and capitalist Italy." In October 1966 Hoxha delivered a speech to a plenum of the CC of the Party of Labour titled "Some Preliminary Ideas about the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution," noting that, "We have been informed about and have followed the recent developments in China only through the Chinese press and Hsinhua. The Communist Party of China and its Central Committee have not given our Party and its Central Committee any special comradely information. We think that as a party so closely linked with ours, it ought to have kept us better informed in an internationalist way, especially during these recent months." Hoxha analyzed the events in China in an overall negative fashion, criticizing among other things the fact that the CCP had not held a congress in ten years and that four years had gone by without a plenum of the CC being called, a practice which "cannot be found in any Marxist-Leninist party." Hoxha