away before China was repainted in all its new colours. The Red can still be found, muted beneath all of the new hues.
If China has lasted so long, perhaps it is because nothing that has come before is ever truly lost. Like all old societies, China has progressed by addition. All its past meanings and colours still exist somewhere, deep in the memory of its people. They are all part of the great and mysterious world that is China, a world that demands for itself both unity and perpetuity.
Even more than the Red China upon which it was built, the New China deserves to be understood. Its global resonances are only beginning to change our habits, our cultures, our economies, possibly even our climates. More than ever before, we Westerners will be challenged to take a position on China. But it is a place that is both unified and incredibly diverse. There will always remain much here that we will find odd, opaque, even ominous. Yet the lessons of the Two Innocents call out to us as clearly as ever: do not become transfixed by fear, by irrational fantasies of what China was, is or will become. For fear would close us off to China. And China—in its immense and growing prosperity, enormous production capacity and huge unanswered hunger—is already upon us.
Our societies will be better served if we reach out to China, happily and innocently, if we explore its depths, marvel at its opacities and idiosyncrasies, and yes, occasionally tremble with awe at its rumblings and missteps. Instead of fearing China, we should share as much as possible in the great adventure of its people.
For the West and China will never overcome each other. Nor should they ever stop learning from each other.
A NOTE ON THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION
The publication of this book in translation eight years after the journey it describes gives rise to some misgivings. In the meantime the condition of its subject and of at least one of its authors has changed considerably. In judging its contents I must ask the reader to keep two factors constantly in mind. For all I know, many of the observations about China (and more than a few of the statistics) may now be out of date. Some of the passing references to Canada, such as to the restrictive policy of the Quebec Censorship Board, are certainly no longer valid.
This book was not written by the Prime Minister of Canada, or by any public official, but by two private citizens responsible only to themselves for inaccuracies or indiscretions.
As I have had some experience of a private critic’s unguarded words being used, years later, against a public figure, I add an all-purpose disclaimer. If there are any statements in the book which can be used to prove that the authors are agents of the international Communist conspiracy, or alternatively fascist exploiters of the working classes, I am sure that my co-author, Jacques Hebért, who remains a private citizen, will be willing to accept entire responsibility for them.
There is at least one comment in the book which I believe to be as true today as it was when we left for Peking: “… it seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China.” Perhaps that is why I am not entirely dismayed that this frank and informal treatment of a controversial subject should belatedly receive a new lease on life.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau OTTAWA, AUGUST 1968
Most English-Canadian readers will require, as I did, one explanatory note. Charles-Paschal-Télésphore Chiniquy was a priest who first became famous in 1844 as a temperance crusader, was involved in two scandals that led to his excommunication, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister at the age of fifty, and wrote a series of sensational anti-Catholic books which were at one time known around the world.
Two other references will be familiar to Canadian readers but not to others. Henri Bourassa, Quebec nationalist leader and founder of the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, was noted for his oratory; and at a Eucharistic Congress in Montreal he made an extemporary speech, in reply to the suggestion that French Canadians ought to speak English, which was published under the title Religion, langue, nationalité (1910).
“Frère Untel” is the pseudonym of Brother Pierre Jérôme (Jean-Paul Desbiens), whose biting critique of Quebec education and society, Les Insolences du Frère Untel, was published by Jacques Hebért in the year of the events recorded here. It was this book that popularized the term “joual” (allegedly a rural pronunciation of cheval), which had been introduced by André Laurendeau, editor of Le Devoir, as an epithet for the kind of slovenly French that he wanted to banish from Quebec speech.
Finally, alert readers will notice that there were five members of the group that included Messrs Hébert and Trudeau, and will find it hard to establish a list. For the record, the other three were: Denis Lazure, psychiatrist; Micheline Legendre, puppeteer; and Madeleine Parent, trade-union official.
I.M.O.
The editor of the 2007 edition adds:
Please note that we have opted to retain Hébert and Trudeau’s original spellings for Chinese names and terms, despite the fact that these do not always conform to modern conventions. Hence the reader will visit “Beijing” and encounter “Mao Zedong” in Alexandre Trudeau’s introduction, but “Peking” and “Mao Tse-tung” in the text that follows.
This book was nearly given a different title: The Yellow Peril: New Edition, Revised, Corrected, and Considerably Enlarged by Jacques Hébert and Pierre E. Trudeau. This would have recalled to more than one reader the picture of China preserved in his subconscious: a land swarming with a multitude of little yellow men, famished, crafty, and (more often than they had any right to be) sinister.
Among all the terrors with which paranoiac educators sought to blight our childhood—freemasonry, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Bolshevism, American materialism, the Red Heel, Chiniquy, and what else?—the Yellow Peril occupied a prominent place.
As schoolboys, we learned from missionary propaganda that China was the natural home of all scourges: pagan religions, plagues, floods, famines, and ferocious beasts. The periodic collection taken up for “stamps of the Holy Childhood” was also an opportunity to remind us of the wretched and slightly devilish state of a people who threw their babies to the pigs. And adventure tales featuring pirates of the China Sea or Fu Man Chus of the Shanghai underworld completed the education of our young minds in the dangers that lurked in the Dragon Empire.
It was during our adolescence that the Peril took on definite shape. College professors soberly proved to us, with statistics, that the demographic surge would soon burst the bounds of China and engulf the white world in a yellow tidal wave. About this time Mr “Believe-It-or-Not” Ripley was diffusing another arresting image: if the Chinese people marched past a given point in fours, the parade (taking account of the birth.
