Pierre Trudeau visited China in the midst of a famine that killed 30 million and reported the country was a model of central planning.
“The friendship and the openness towards China that my father taught me, I’m certainly hoping to pass on not only to my children but to generations of Canadians in the future,” he said.
In this image from Two Innocents in Red China, Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hebert salute a monk in Buddhist fashion in China.“Skeptics may well tell us these are false fronts, or even exceptional successes by which we shouldn’t be overimpressed. That is not our opinion,” reads the book’s conclusion, adding that the government of Mao Zedong is “leading its people out of several millennia of misery.”
Contrary to popular belief, Trudeau wasn’t the first Western leader to recognize Communist China; France and the U.K. already had lukewarm relations with the Beijing government at the time. But Trudeau was certainly the most enthusiastic.Article content The now-ex prime minister – along with an 18-year-old Justin and a 15-year-old Alexandre – received permission from Chinese authorities for a family vacation that would need to be accompanied at all times by government minders. “We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourselves,” was how it was explained to the visiting Canadians.
Alexandre would end up writing his own China travelogue – the 2016 book Barbarian Lost – and was open about his own admiration for the country’s authoritarian government. “I don’t think China could have come so far so quickly without the unity and organizational power has provided,” he says to an interviewee in one section.
This would be best characterized by a 2013 quote at a Toronto fundraiser in which he picked China as the “administration he most admired.” “There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime,”After successfully taking power in 2015, Trudeau would pursue what he called a “reset” with the People’s Republic.
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