I found this old French CBC documentary about Elder Trudeau’s 1973 visit to the PRC and his meeting with Mao on YouTube. It was split into four parts and I grabbed the four parts and stitched them together in Riverside FM, then used Sonix to transcribe the video compilation, and then I used Deepl to translate the French transcript en Anglais. (Scroll down to see the PDF of the English transcript.) By the way, reader, if you’re interested, you can find the 1968 edition of Two Innocents in Red China here, at the Internet Archive — I powered through all 180 pages in a Sunday afternoon, you should have no problem getting through it in a few hours. I find Two Innocents in Red China quite “interesting,” shall we say. It strikes me as very Pierre Trudeau — those of us old enough to remember him at his prime will recognise the sardonic style of his voice in the pages of this book. The book leaves me feeling naggingly discomfited. Reader, I found it off-putting. Particularly because in my youth Canadian society led me to believe in Pierre Trudeau, the mythical heroic patriarch of Canada, the man who brought the constitution home blah blah blah. Reader, when you read this book, you might come away uncertain of what to think. Resisting the urge to project your modern-day knowledge onto the people in the historical period of your study, that’s a key thing to remember when examining history. It’s damned difficult. We all want to attribute malfeasance and intentionality to historical figures in the course of our study. In particular, study of atrocity seduces us project all manner of things onto the people from the historical period—it ends up hijacking us from the rigours of historical analysis and it obscures the historical reality from emerging. It poses us a challenge to study history whilst leaving ourselves behind. Remember, human history is not an Alfred Hitchcock movie, it’s the story of deeply flawed persons, with intentions and goals and values. We can create monsters or we can document and tell story of the history of humans. Reader, these two projects are not the same. So, reader, did Trudeau know about the horrific deaths and the massive famine that plagued the Chinese people at the time of his visit? How much did people know? How much did people within China know? How much did people outside China know? How much did world leaders and statesmen know? When he visited the PRC in 1960 Trudeau had no access to the information he did as a statesman, did he? Reader, how much do you think Trudeau knew about the mass murders that took place right under his nose, in 1960? When I read Holocaust history, I frequently have to remind myself that being in the Holocaust provides a different vantage point from being outside the Holocaust decades into the future with a treasure trove of historical documentation and evidence at my fingertips. Why wouldn’t era of The Great Leap Forward Famine and Horrors prove any different? Reader, it would not. Humans are human and they hooman. Confirmation bias is not my friend. I repeat the question, reader — did Trudeau and Hebert know the full story of the human devastation they waded into in 1961? Good question. I do not have an answer, reader. “the root cause of the Great Famine was the centralized system of power at the time, that is, the government controlled all resources” — Yang Jisheng In his book Tombstone, Yang Jisheng wrote that the peak of unnatural deaths of the Great Leap Forward happened in 1960, just a few months before Trudeau and Hebert would have visited. Both Jisheng and Dikkoter report that everyone who survived that period had to make some morally horrific and unimaginable choices — parents forced to bury their children alive, people resorting to cannibalism, people watched their loved ones die from intestinal blockages caused by eating white porcelain dirt. From this interview of Jisheng, with Russ Roberts, here’s the story of the death of Jisheng’s father. Jisheng’s father died of starvation during the spring of 1959, Jisheng was away at high school, 10 km away from his village. When a friend told him of his father’s unwellness, Jisheng stopped his ration of food for 3 days and took that, 1.5 kg of rice, to his father who told him to leave. Jisheng gathered some wild vegetables for his father. Jisheng didn’t know his father was dying — by the time of his visit Jisheng’s father was so affected by starvation he could not eat the food and he knew he was dying. Jisheng believed that his father’s death was an isolated incident, he had no idea his father’s death happened as part of a larger mass starvation that plagued the entire country. Jisheng didn’t know about the mass starvation until the middle of the cultural revolution, which took place between 1966 and 1976. Mao’s plan included a destruction of the family and its replacement with the commune. Mao abolished private property, his henchmen forced the destruction of the family home as the basic production unit of Chinese society. This entailed destroying individual kitchens, destroyed pots and pans and individual residential food storage capacity. It entailed forcing people to take their meals in communes. The government removed the incentive to produce, it forced unreasonably high quotas, and took the entire production yield away to be managed by the regime. The government controlled all means of production, it controlled access to all goods, including and especially food. The Mao regime set highly exaggerated estimations and quotas for all production, including agricultural outputs. The communist cadre engaged in widespread abuse of the peasantry, abusing their privileges by taking more for themselves and their families and friends. Jisheng recounts to economist Russ Roberts that in Shenyang, people could not write letters, they could not share information about the widespread starvation and horrors they experienced and witnessed. Jisheng recounted how the postal officials worked with the police and security officials to prevent the letters from being sent. As you can imagine, this all adds up to unfathomable widespread hardship. Fear and powerful indoctrination hung over the society like a Damocles’ Sword. Disagreement with the government could get a person tortured, beaten, starved, killed. Reader, I have to ask out loud — during their autumn of 1960 visit to the PRC, did Trudeau and Hebert benefit from the abuse of the communist officials taking more for themselves and depriving the people? Did Trudeau ever reflect on that possibility? I Am a Pyrophyte is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Did Trudeau and Hebert really see no signs of these horrors during their 5 or 6 week visit to Communist China in the autumn of 1960? I know, I sound like a broken record, reader. It’s just, well, I have trouble knowing that the cunning and brilliant Pierre Trudeau knew nothing of the worst mass murder in human history when he visited the country where it happened. The PRC officials took Trudeau and Hebert on an extensive tour of the country, Trudeau and Hebert knew about communes and production quotas and they heard at length about the Mao Zedong doctrine. Can we really believe they didn’t know, reader? Still, I wonder how much of this thinking emerges from my projecting my 2025 mindset and historical knowledge onto a 1960 man. The questions don’t stop coming, reader. They beckon me. * How much did Trudeau know about these mass murders of the period of time between 1958 and 1962 that we call The Great Leap Forward, in the years that followed? * Did he know about the horrors in 1970 when he decided to initiate diplomatic relations with the PRC? * What about on his first official visit as PM of Canada, in 1973? * Did Pierre Trudeau know that he shook hands with the worst mass murderer in human history when he grinned widely for the cameras and the cadre present to witness the performance? These questions torment me, reader. Reader, when I look at Trudeau’s seeming nonchalance at the threat of Mao Zedong and PRC in 1973, in particular his characterisation of legitimate fear of the PRC as foolish, I cannot help but hear his oldest son in 2023/4 dismissing the concerns about the UFWD and the PRC’s hostile attempts to infiltrated our democratic institutions at all levels. Justin Trudeau told the country that he believes the difficulties between PRC and Canada can reach a resolution through diplomatic means. Reader, does the father speak through the son? As I have written here previously, I think we must view the LPC disregard for the seriousness of the PRC foreign interference, and the threat of the CCP itself, through the lens of Pierre Trudeau’s political vision of Communist China and Mao himself. Trudeau Goes to China :: Video Transcript :: En Français [00:00:00] Speaker1 Plus de la garde portant le drapeau rouge frappé de l'étoile. Ce voyage officiel, le Canada en attendait beaucoup. On le voulait réussi sur tous les points et il commençait sous de bons augures. Il n'y avait pas que l'Est qui était rouge où que l'on posa les yeux. Panneaux et banderoles souhaitaient la bienvenue, chaleureuse au premier chef de gouvernement canadien à débarquer en terre chinoise et saluait ceux qui l'accompagnaient. Plus d'une vingtaine de hauts fonctionnaires, plus de 50 journalistes de tout le Canada, mais à l'œil ébloui de l'Occidental. Ce qui frappait d'abord sur le tarmac immense, c'était à perte de vue, la foule bigarrée, les fillettes aux 1000 voix agitant les drapeaux canadiens et chinois. Pékin, 6 millions d'habitants, la capitale du Nord. Au premier coup d'œil, une ville envahie par les bicyclettes propres et reboisées. Le contraste se dessine. Au grand hall du Peuple. Chuanli accueille son vis à vis canadien. Devant la presse a
