In September and October of 1960, future prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau became one of the very first Canadians to travel to the People’s Republic of China with official permission since the communist takeover in Trudeau visited China with his good friend Jacques Hébert (a journalist and publisher) and a few other Quebeckers, all at the invitation of a Chinese government eager to showcase its successes for the world. In China they would join with people from several other countries who were touring the country in carefully selected and monitored groups under tightly controlled itineraries.
The next year, Trudeau and Hébert co-wrote and published Deux innocents en Chine rouge, an account of their excellent adventure in China. This popular book was published in English translation in 1968 after Trudeau became prime minister, and the Shanghai People’s Publishing House has now made it available—as of last year—in Chinese translation. (1) In any language...
David Curtis Wright teaches history at the University of Calgary and is the author of The History of China (Greenwood, 2001) and From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-Century China: Song’s Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao (Brill, 2005). He is on sabbatical at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology in Taipei, Taiwan.
Advertisement
Advertisement