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Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.

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When Justin Trudeau first visited China as Canadian prime minister, in August 2016, he brought along his seven-year-old daughter. It was a symbolic gesture, he told reporters in Beijing, because Justin himself had first visited China as a child when his father, Pierre, was prime minister. 

“The friendship and the openness towards China that my father taught me, I’m certainly hoping to pass on not only to my children but to generations of Canadians in the future,” he said. After years of tensions between the two countries under Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, the young Trudeau arrived promising a “reset.” 

The affection was mutual. Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier,  would soon herald a “golden era” of Canada-China relations. It didn’t hurt that in China, the Trudeau name was already synonymous with Sino-Canadian optimism. In 1970, the elder Trudeau had officially recognized China (nine years before the U.S. did), helped it join the UN, and opened the door for an explosion of trade between the two countries. When Justin was elected prime minister, in 2015, internet users in China started affectionately referring to him as “Little Potato,” as “Trudeau” rhymes with tudou.¹Tudou is the word for “potato” in Chinese. 

The bonhomie was on such stark display that some critics believed Trudeau was too friendly to China. At a fundraiser in 2013, before he was elected prime minister, Trudeau had been asked which foreign government he admired most. “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” he said. “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” The remark sparked a backlash among Conservatives and created an image that, in the years since, has stuck. 

“Trudeau was immediately painted with a brush of being at least soft on China or at worst sympathetic to China,” says Paul Evans, a professor at the University of British Columbia who wrote a book on the history of Canada-China engagement.

There were hiccups, of course. In negotiations for an ambitious Free Trade Agreement, starting in 2016, Trudeau insisted on labor and environmental protections as well as measures promoting gender equality in business — all of which were non-starters with Beijing. But in general, for the first three years of Trudeau’s tenure, the two countries were chummy. Even as China’s relationship with the U.S. grew tenser, Chinese leaders invoked their longstanding friendship with Canada — America’s kinder, gentler neighbor. 

Then Meng Wanzhou was arrested. 

On the morning of Dec. 1, 2018, at Vancouver International Airport, immigration authorities detained Meng, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei and the daughter of its founder. The United States had requested that Canada hold Meng for extradition, alleging that she had violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and lied about it to the bank HSBC. Clad in a hoodie and sweatpants, Meng was interrogated for three hours and then turned over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and formally charged. 

When Canadian officials announced the arrest, Trudeau stressed that his government was simply following judicial procedures: “There was no engagement or involvement in the political level in this decision.” Still, Chinese officials blamed Canada for doing the Americans’ bidding, and demanded Meng’s release. The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa issued a statement saying that the arrest “harmed the human rights of the victim.” 

At first, it seemed the dispute might remain procedural, and that Canada could stay neutral. But then China raised the stakes by arresting two Canadians — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — who had lived and worked in China for years. The “two Michaels,” as they became known, had violated state security, Chinese media claimed. 

Over the following months, with Meng and the two Michaels in legal limbo, the relationship deteriorated further. China cut off Canadian imports of canola oil, one of Canada’s major exports and the source of US$2.1 billion a year in revenue. The prospect of a free-trade agreement dimmed. And both sides traded accusations of bad faith, with the Chinese ambassador accusing Canada of “white supremacy.” Last summer, China formally charged the two Michaels with espionage, putting pressure on Trudeau to find a way to release Meng before they were sentenced — at which point it might be too late to bring them home. 

The diplomatic meltdown would have been shocking under any leader, but was especially so under Trudeau. Guy Saint-Jacques, the former Canadian ambassador to China, says Trudeau underestimated how difficult his relationship with China would be, perhaps owing to “hubris”: “He came to China the first time thinking, ‘I’ll help China take its rightful place in the world as my father did almost 50 years ago.’ I think he failed to acknowledge that China has changed.” 

In facing down the Meng crisis — which is still ongoing — Trudeau has had to decide how to address his father’s legacy: To prioritize the warm relationship with China to which Pierre dedicated so much of his life, or to reject it — and risk destroying it altogether — in favor of preserving Canada’s commitment to rule of law and its alliance with the United States.

ON CANADA’S TERMS

Pierre Trudeau’s interest in China began as a bout of contrarianism. In his late 20s, the Montreal-born intellectual had finished bouncing around universities when, in 1948, he ignored his mother’s urgings to “settle down” and decided to backpack around the world, with stops in the Middle East, India, and China. In a letter to his brother, Pierre described himself as “a nomad by inclination”: “As I discover the world, I discover myself.” 

Of all the times to visit China, Trudeau picked the climax of the civil war. According to his account, he “slipped into” Kuomintang-controlled territory from Hong Kong in 1949, and found the country in “a state of anarchy.” He wanted to stay in Shanghai to watch the Red Army invade, he said, but the two sides reached a tentative truce. 

A decade later, Pierre — by then an influential writer and gadfly — returned to China as a guest of the Communist Party. With China in the midst of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the visit by Trudeau and his colleague, Jacques Hébert, was not so much an expression of support for Mao as it was a rebuke of knee-jerk Cold War anti-Communism. Trudeau and Hébert toured the country, visiting factories, hospitals, and prisons. In their 1961 book, Two Innocents in Red China, the two men recounted the proclamations of miraculous productivity and revolutionary fervor with a tone of wry knowingness. But they were clearly charmed by their hosts — particularly Zhou Enlai, whom Trudeau would call the most impressive leader he’d ever met. 

Trudeau argued that the world needed to understand China on its own terms. He believed that “China must not be sermonized,” wrote Alexandre Trudeau, Justin’s younger brother, in an introduction to the book. “[O]utsiders simply cannot know what is best for China nor how it need travel down its chosen paths.” 

“He was ready to engage China as what it was at the time, rather than what he wished China to be,” says Wenran Jiang, an advisor at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. 

That said, Trudeau hoped that welcoming China into the global community would steer it toward a western consensus. As he and his foreign policy advisor wrote in their book The Canadian Way, China “could be expected over time to adjust its political, economic, and social practices to bring them into harmony with international norms.”  

The idea of recognizing China was considered a rebuff of the United States, but when Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, he styled himself as a new kind of leader, one willing to wear flashy jackets and side burns, talk about sex and divorce, mock the stuffiness of the Crown — and stake out Canadian independence from U.S. policy.²There is remarkable video of the Trudeau meeting with Mao here

He faced plenty of opposition — Conservatives called him soft on Communism — but sentiment was shifting. Polls at the time showed popular opinion in Canada moving from strongly anti-recognition to an even split. France had already recognized China in 1964, as had the UK in 1950. And behind the scenes, the Americans were pursuing rapprochement. 

In 1969, Canadian diplomats reached out to their Chinese counterparts in Stockholm. China responded positively, but with a stipulation: Mao’s government demanded that Canada recognize Taiwan as a rightful part of China and that it cut off relations with Taipei. Ultimately, Canadian diplomats came up with a creative phrasing: Canada would “take note of” China’s claim to Taiwan, without explicitly endorsing it. This satisfied the Chinese negotiators, and a deal was struck. 

It was a major moment for Canada. “There are few foreign policy decisions that have been made on purely Canadian terms,” says David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China. Trudeau’s China coup was “probably the most significant independent Canadian foreign policy decision we’ve ever had.” 

Recognition was good for China, too. Other countries had reached out about establishing diplomatic relations, but China picked Canada first because of its proximity to the United States. “The big prize was always America and the UN, not Canada,” says Gordon Houlden, a former diplomat who was posted in Beijing.

Formal recognition ushered in an era of good feelings. Trade between the two countries doubled in three years. Trudeau formally visited China in 1973, and hammered out an immigration agreement and an education exchange, opening the door for Chinese students to study in North America. Mao touted the history of warmth between the two countries, including the story of Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who helped the Communists during the civil war.

There are few foreign policy decisions that have been made on purely Canadian terms… [Trudeau’s China coup was] probably the most significant independent Canadian foreign policy decision we’ve ever had.

David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China

With the door open, Canadian business rushed through as well. Leading the charge was Paul Desmarais, head of the Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada and an advisor to Pierre Trudeau. Desmarais helped establish the Canada-China Business Council and ushered in an era of Chinese investment when he sold a 50 percent stake in a paper mill in British Columbia to state-backed CITIC.³Officially the China International Trust and Investment Corporation Power Corp. also boasted strong ties to the Liberal Party: Pierre Trudeau himself became an “adviser” post-retirement, prime minister Paul Martin once served as president of a Power Corp. shipping subsidiary, and prime minister Jean Chretien’s daughter married into the Desmarais family. 

“They were very mobbed up,” says Houlden. “I don’t mean that in a literal sense, but they were very close politically with the Trudeau government.” 

There were still periods of tension. After the Chinese government massacred its own citizens on June 4, 1989, Canada suspended cooperation with China on programs from developmental assistance to nuclear consultations, and relaxed its policy towards Chinese asylum applicants. Canada also accepted an influx of immigrants from Hong Kong after the UK handed it over to China in 1997, creating a strong community of Chinese dissidents in Canada. 

But even at those low points, Trudeau and the Liberals favored engagement over isolation. In 1990, mere months after Tiananmen Square, Trudeau and his family — including Justin — visited China, drawing criticism. According to his son Alexandre, during the trip to Beijing Pierre would “refer very delicately to the sad difficulties that China had recently faced,” but would emphasize that “outsiders simply cannot know what is best for China.” 

That tone of non-judgment would persist under Trudeau’s Liberal successors, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, who oversaw historic expansions of the trade relationship. In the last two decades, Canadian imports from China exploded from about $10 billion to $57 billion⁴In U.S. dollar terms in 2019.⁵There has also been a rising trade deficit. If Canada’s relationship with China began with political idealism, it had by the new century become an economic necessity. 

Even the Conservatives were eventually forced to embrace economic engagement. When Prime Minister Harper assumed power in 2006, he initially steered China policy in a more confrontational direction, declining to attend the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and meeting with the Dalai Lama. “The emphasis was, human rights trumped everything else,” says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. 

But after the financial crisis of 2008, “we moved to Harper 2.0,” says Yves Tiberghien, a professor at the University of British Columbia. According to Tiberghien, Harper “had an epiphany at the G20 and decided that he needed to work with the giant country” in solving the crisis.

By the time Justin took over as prime minister in 2015,⁶An earlier version of this article erroneously listed 2016 as the date he took over there was a bipartisan consensus that the best approach to China was cooperation. Xi Jinping had recently become president, and advocates of liberalization still held out hope that he would be a reformer. “It was an optimistic moment,” Evans says. 

SLEEPING WITH ELEPHANTS

As Justin Trudeau took his seat at the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, he made sure to look preoccupied. He checked his briefcase, looked over his left shoulder — anything to avoid the man in the boxy, black suit to his right. To be fair, Xi Jinping was also avoiding eye contact with Trudeau. For several awkward minutes caught on camera, the two world leaders acted like icy frenemies at the cafeteria lunch table.

From the Chinese perspective, the solution to the standoff was simple: Release Meng. Her arrest was clearly political, they argued, and Canada was doing Donald Trump’s bidding. “The Chinese don’t believe Canadian assurances that there’s judicial independence,” says Charles Burton, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and former diplomat. “From their point of view, a junior judicial official can be easily directed by the people in Ottawa on how to rule.”

Some Canadians also advocated for Meng’s release. John Manley, a former foreign affairs minister, said the Trudeau government should have used “creative incompetence” to “just miss her” in the first place. Ambassador John McCallum said that it would be “great for Canada” if the U.S. dropped its extradition request; he resigned shortly after. A group of 19 high-profile Canadians, including two former foreign affairs ministers and a former Supreme Court justice, signed a letter calling for the minister of justice to release Meng in order to bring Kovrig and Spavor home. Vina Nadjibulla, Kovrig’s wife, backed the letter, saying her husband was “in the fight for his life.” 

But Trudeau dug in. “If countries around the world, including China, realize that by arbitrarily arresting random Canadians, they can get what they want out of Canada… that makes an awful lot more Canadians who travel around the world vulnerable,” he said in June. 

The China relationship is in the dumpster, and it won’t get fixed as long as Meng is around.

Gordon Houlden, a former diplomat who was posted in Beijing

Meng’s case, meanwhile, drags on. A Vancouver court determined the case did satisfy a major requirement for extradition — that her conduct is also a crime in Canada — but Meng’s legal team continues to challenge the legitimacy of the charges, arguing she was illegally searched before her arrest and that her bail conditions are overly strict. (She’s been allowed to stay at her $16 million mansion in Vancouver.) In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meng was working with the U.S. Justice Department to reach a deal, but officials haven’t confirmed it. 

Until her case is resolved, Canada and China remain deadlocked. “The China relationship is in the dumpster, and it won’t get fixed as long as Meng is around,” says Houlden. 

What would Pierre do if he were in charge? Comparing the two Trudeaus is difficult under such radically different circumstances. Pierre courted an emerging China that constituted a mere 2 percent of global GDP. Justin is dealing with the world’s second largest economy, soon to be largest, that now accounts for 18 percent of global GDP.⁷Based on purchasing-power-parity China is no longer an underdog, and Canada, which depends on trade for most of its GDP, has less leverage than it once did. Justin therefore has less room to maneuver than this father did. “He’s fenced in,” says Houlden. Plus, says Tiberghien, “The cost of making a mistake is much higher.”  

Moreover, popular sentiment has turned against China: A poll in the spring showed that only 14 percent of Canadians had a positive view of China. After the Meng and two Michaels incidents, Ong says, “I don’t think it’s possible to follow in his father’s footsteps anymore.”

Trudeau might be able to follow in Joe Biden’s, however. After Biden’s victory in November, Trudeau said he was “extremely confident” the new U.S. president would help pressure China to release Kovrig and Spavor. If the Biden administration sets the tone, Evans says, “then we can coast with it.”

But a Biden bailout would be a temporary solution. Pierre famously said that living next to the U.S. was like “sleeping with an elephant. … One is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Now, with China’s rise, Canada finds itself stuck between two elephants, and the new one has shown a willingness to confront Canada aggressively. During the recent Hong Kong protests, for example, Cong Peiwu, the Chinese ambassador to Canada, said that granting asylum to dissidents could threaten the “health and safety” of Canadians living in Hong Kong.⁸Canada has granted asylum to 14 Hong Kong activists.

Even as Trudeau has resisted pressure in Meng’s case, on other issues he’s sought not to provoke the China elephant. In December, the Globe and Mail reported his government hesitated to cancel training exercises with the PLA,⁹People’s Liberation Army fearing it could be seen as retaliation for the detention of Kovrig and Spavor. He also punted on calls to ban Huawei’s 5G technology, even though the U.S., the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have all done so. 

This balancing act can be frustrating for those who wish Trudeau would stand up to China. “It pains me to say it, but we’re seeing more creativity coming from Australia,” says Mulroney. “They’re doing what Canada did in the golden age of its diplomacy 30, 40 years ago: daring to challenge China.” 

“His dad was a strategist,” Evans says. “He was exceptionally good at putting together story lines.” Pierre argued that welcoming China into the global fold would both serve Canada’s economic interests and push China to reform. But now that China has not liberalized as predicted, Evan says, “Justin Trudeau and the current Liberal government have not come up with a new narrative.”

Yet, Pierre’s narrative was never as simple as presented. Trudeau senior was “about contradiction,” Burton says. He withheld judgment on the sins of the CCP, while strengthening liberal rights and freedoms back home. He pushed for UN recognition of China, with little regard for the consequences on loyal ally Taiwan. ¹⁰(Even the hardened realist Kissinger wrote that “[n]o government less deserved” derecognition than Taiwan.) Burton argues that Justin has embraced Pierre’s vision of engagement, which often means turning a blind eye to inconvenient truths. Justin’s pragmatic approach to certain issues — such as his reluctance to sanction Chinese officials complicit in repressive policies in Xinjiang or ban Huawei’s 5G network — is not unlike Pierre’s during the Cultural Revolution. “From that point of view,” says Burton, “Justin’s policies are consistent with his father’s.”

Perhaps the family’s true legacy is the ability to balance various moral imperatives and navigate a world of diverse personalities with competing interests, whether they’re Nixon and Mao, or Trump and Xi — in other words, to act like a politician.

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