Two Innocents in Red China. Rev. ed.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Though their “innocence” was doubtful, Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert had much in common with the characters in Mark Twain’s Two Innocents Abroad, who managed to cut the ties between what they saw and an imagined past. That is the main theme throughout Two Innocents in Red China, the record of their month-long 1960 visit to the People’s Republic of China published in 1961 and now reprinted with an introduction by Alexandre Trudeau.

Trudeau and Hébert were severely restricted by their Chinese hosts to endless rounds of visits to “model” schools, factories, and farms — all part of the development “theatre” shown to visitors and the world through glossy propaganda magazines. Both men knew these showpiece projects were likely atypical, but never had the opportunity to escape from the China the government was desperate to show to all foreigners.

At the time of their visit, China had just begun to suffer the ravages of statistical anarchy and delusional planning that characterized the Great Leap Forward of 1957–62, when widespread famine may have killed as many as 20 million Chinese. Although Trudeau and Hébert discounted as exaggeration and propaganda the reports of famine in 1960, their misreading of the catastrophe said less about their judgment than the willful disregard of economic reality by Chinese planners that scarred this period.

While they were sympathetic, neither man missed the contradictions that Party cadres hoped to obscure. Chinese workers, even in model projects, showed little spontaneity or satisfaction — impossible, Trudeau and Hébert noted, when labour “reform” was a key component of political re-education. How could work be ennobling and punitive? Repeated unsuccessful efforts to arrange meetings with artists, academics, or journalists only deepened their cynicism. Yet for the all the scrims their Chinese handlers placed before them, the “innocents” clung to their generosity toward the Chinese government and the official “line” on the achievements — if not the costs — of the Great Leap Forward. Although that China no longer exists, Two Innocents in Red China remains a brief but poignant glimpse of the early years of the world’s third largest economy.