of 1937 as he worried deeply about the crisis. Koo met several times with diplomats from the Japanese embassy in Paris in an attempt to find a diplomatic solution, but the Japanese kept making extreme demands that Koo rejected. Koo wrote in his diary that the news from China was "depressing" as he expressed dismay at the news that the Japanese had taken Beijing, adding in "I felt no face to see anybody. China has become a joke". Koo broke off talks with the Japanese who had rejected his demand that Beijing be returned to China. Koo wrote in his diary that reports that the Japanese were heavily bombing Tianjin "made his hair stand up" with fear. Later that same month, the Japanese took Tianjin, which Koo called his diary the "most depressing and sickening news". As China had hardly an arms industry at the time and needed to import arms, the Chinese were at an disadvantage against the better armed Japanese, whose more industrialized nation did have an arms industry. Koo's principal duty in Paris was to secure the supply of arms into China via a railroad that ran from the French colony of Indochina (modern Vietnam) into China. The arms that were carried into China were not just French, but were also came from the Soviet Union. Several times, the French cabinet considered closing the railroad following complaints from the Japanese embassy in Paris and dark hints that Japan might invade Indochina if the railroad were not closed, but Koo was always able to persuade the French to keep the railroad running. Koo felt that the best response to the Japanese invasion was a Sino-Soviet alliance with "Anglo-American-French material co-operation in the background". Koo believed that as the victors of World War I that both Britain and France had a vested interest in upholding the international order created after that war with "the moral sympathy and support of the United States". Koo argued that the Franco-Soviet alliance provided for a certain stability in Europe, and the lack of the same stability in Asia was what was explained why "Japan could run amuck". Koo felt it was in their own interests of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States to support China, and he was gravely disappointed when he discovered that his viewpoint was not as widely shared as he had assumed. As the chief of the