Two Innocents in Red China

In the spirit of his father, Alexandre Trudeau revisits China to put a ground-breaking journey into a fresh, contemporary context. In 1960, Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert, a labour lawyer and a journalist from Montréal, travelled to China in the midst of the Great Leap Forward. In 1968, when Two Innocents in Red China, Trudeau and Hébert’s sardonic look at a third world country’s first steps into the rest world, was released in English, Trudeau had become prime minister of Canada. It seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China,” Trudeau wrote in the foreword. Four decades later, China’s emergence as an economic and military heavyweight beckoned Trudeau’s journalist son Alexandre to retrace his father’s footsteps and add additional material to the book. The result is a thought-provoking new perspective on the Canadian classic that helped open China to the world.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada from April 1968 to June 1979 and again from March 1980 to June 1984. In 1970, he established diplomatic relations with China, a move other Western nations would soon follow. He died in 2000.

Jacques Hebert is a Canadian author, journalist, politician and traveler. A Senator from 1983 to 1998, he founded two publishing houses, plus Canada World Youth and Katimavik. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Alexandre Trudeau, second son of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau, is a filmmaker and contributing editor at Maclean's magazine who has reported from Iraq, Liberia, Haiti and Israel. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.