Two Innocents in Red China. Pierre Elliot Trudeau
the appropriate diplomatic channels and told them of his desire to visit their country, accompanied by his three boys. I remember getting increasingly excited at the thought of travelling to China at a time of great change. Even my typically impassive father was more and more stimulated by these events and by what they might mean for that summer’s trip.
My father had of course been to China several times before. He had made his first trip in 1949, just before the Communists finally routed the remainder of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and pushed them out of their last stronghold in Shanghai. He had seen China in the throes of massive change; perhaps he would witness yet another dramatic period of its history.
I was fifteen at the time, so my excitement was more than just an eagerness to see history unfolding before my eyes. I was also impressed by the charismatic young student leaders who were standing up to the venerable figures of authority in their country. I already felt inclined to stand up to authority myself. I had already come to believe, as I still believe, that the world belongs to those who seize it and that every generation has to seize the world anew.
Furthermore, as long as I could remember, my father had entertained us with tales of his worldly adventures. He told us of encounters with pirates and bandits, of his journeys through war zones and across endless wastelands. I had thus already made up my mind that to become a real traveller—a real man, one might even say—I too would have to live such high adventures. China in the middle of a huge nationwide protest—even, perhaps, a regime change—fit the bill as a good start-up adventure.
On June 4, 1989, after weeks of protest and terse negotiations between the student leaders and the government, the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army were called in, and the protests were violently quashed. The world watched in horror. At the Trudeau residence, our trip was suddenly called into question. Could we really still go to China? Would we still be received there? Did we even want to go after such a bloody and dramatic event?
The debate in the family was passionate. I remember suggesting that we still go. Damn the politics of appearances, I argued: we would be the only Westerners in the whole place and have the country to ourselves. The matter was eventually decided when the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs strongly urged us not to go, having recalled their ambassador in protest. I also seem to remember that the Chinese themselves admitted that it was perhaps not an appropriate time for visitors. And so our China trip was postponed.
The following year, I was insistent that we make our delayed trip. My father was still a little concerned about appearances: how would people view a former prime minister travelling to a country with which Canada had still not re-established relations? But he ultimately decided that this was a private family trip, made by private citizens to an ancient country. It needn’t have any political meaning.
So it was that in the summer of 1990, my father, my older brother and I set off on a six-week trip through China (my younger brother had since decided that he was more interested in summer camp than journeys with his family). Only a year after Tiananmen, the country still had some bleak undertones. But I did get my wish: there were practically no other foreigners to be seen anywhere. The tourist hotels were empty. Although the country had already embarked upon the road to economic liberalization and growth, some of the characteristics of earlier Chinese periods, such as authoritarian rule and a lack of contact with the outside world, had reappeared. The China of 1990 was more like the Red China of my father’s first trips than the economic powerhouse it would soon become. The winds of change had momentarily been stilled.
Despite my father’s plans, our trip was anything but private. We were treated as political guests and accompanied by officials and interpreters wherever we went. Every night, there were banquets and solemn toasts and speeches. When called to speak, my father would invariably refer very delicately to the sad difficulties that China had recently faced. He spoke of his hope that China and the West, which still had so much to learn from each other, would soon foster better relations. China is an ancient land with its own internal imperatives, he would add; outsiders simply cannot know what is best for China nor how it need travel down its chosen paths.
I learnt a lot during that trip. Not so much about China; the shadow plays of officialdom never interested me much. But I learnt a lot about the way my father viewed China and about the way he travelled. This was fitting, because this was to be the last of our family trips. The following year, I began hitchhiking my own way through North America. My own career as an adventurer, which has continued to this day, had begun.
There was something puzzling about my father’s attitude towards China. Why did he not dwell upon the Tiananmen incidents with our Chinese hosts? He wasn’t simply being diplomatic, avoiding tricky issues. In private, too, he behaved in a distinct and subtle way towards China. I had caught glimpses of this unusual behaviour at other times and in other places, but in China I witnessed him sustaining it for several weeks. “It is hard to know how China needs to move forward,” he would say. “Missteps in this immense country lead to death and suffering on a gargantuan scale.” It is not that he didn’t find the repression in Tiananmen Square grotesque—he did, he thought it arbitrary and wrong. But he would not let it shut dialogue down.
He was allowing for mistakes. It was very Socratic behaviour. In allowing the Chinese government the mistake of Tiananmen, he was accepting his own inability to change the course of things. He was professing his ignorance. Not gross ignorance, but the ignorance of a listener. Innocence. Not the political innocence that I mentioned earlier, but a more primal innocence.
My father first travelled to China in 1949, the year he turned thirty. After years of erudite studies at various prestigious universities, he drew the theoretical portion of his education to a close in order to devote himself to applying his ideas to the real world. It was time to test their mettle.
Long before, his father, a brawny and clever fellow, had made him understand that “book sense” could only carry a man so far; to succeed in the world, common sense was also vital. And common sense had to be acquired in the rough streets or the unforgiving wilds. Guided by his long-departed father’s wisdom, my father always tried to make sure that his ideas could survive the tests of reality. An impatient and ambitious young man, he was never going to wait passively for such tests to happen; instead, he went out and aggressively provoked them. He often seemed to be deliberately steering himself towards reality’s hard edges, then bracing himself for a crash. One might argue that he was not so much testing his ideas as building an unassailable carapace for them. Either way, he made harsh demands on his body and mind throughout his youth, to ensure they were ready to cope with adversity. He played hard, trained hard and sought out challenges, both physical and mental. He was a top student and an impressive athlete. Among his peers, he was reputed to be both a fierce debater and a razor sharp wit with the pen.
In his twenties, he tested himself further afield. He took the historical model of the legendary coureurs-des-bois, who he saw as the true heroes of the mental and physical wilds of yore. Like Pierre-Esprit Radisson, he endeavoured to canoe from Montreal to James Bay. “What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that is purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than others,” he wrote after that lengthy trip. He was already a traveller.
Through his twenties, he multiplied and diversified his trips. By canoe, by motorcycle or on foot, he bumped up against reality whichever way he could. He owned some stock in an Abitibi mining company and wanted a taste of its reality, so for a few months one summer, he got a job as a miner there.
In his meanderings in Quebec and Canada, however, whether in a mine shaft, in the wilds or in the city, my father was never challenged morally. He pushed his physical endurance to the limit but never went beyond the confines of well-established social values. He inhabited a world that he could depend upon. It wasn’t until his 1949 round-the-world trip that he would venture past those frontiers. Amidst the chaos that marked the beginning of the end of the colonial period, he quickly learnt that reality did not always need to be provoked—out in the wide world, its onslaught was both unending and merciless. In the Canadian wilds, he had deliberately deprived himself of physical and even psychological shelter, but he had never had to deal with the near total absence of all moral shelter. In his great journey of 1949 he found himself on many occasions without the protection of the rule of law, in situations