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If so, why did he never repudiate his glaringly wrong-headed 1961 claims that Mao Zedong’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward counted as an international social achievement and that China as a nation that had its social priorities straight?

During his visit to China, Trudeau and other Quebec intellectuals were guests of Mao’s regime, dining in splendor and eagerly swallowing massive dollops of propaganda as they toured the country. In Two Innocents in Red China, a 1961 book Trudeau co-authored with Jacques Hebert, Communist China emerges as a global force for good. Under Communism, they wrote, the small-wage earner “is no longer just a speck of dust in the proletarian mass … The genius of Mao is to have persuaded hundreds of millions of people — by astonishingly effective methods — of the grandeur and nobility of their task.” Persuaded might not be the right word to described Mao’s methods.

Trudeau met Mao, and called him “one of the great men of the century.” Trudeau wrote of his “powerful head, an unlined face, and a look of wisdom tinged with melancholy. The eyes of that tranquil face are heavy with having seen too much of the misery of men.”

It was the face and eyes of a mass murderer. As Mao shook hands with Trudeau, millions of Chinese had already died across the country as part of a national “Superpower Programme” to industrialize and modernize China. The malevolence of the agricultural and production reforms, their cruelty and abusiveness, are documented in horrific detail by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their monumental book Mao: The Untold Story. The resulting 38 million deaths were what Chang and Halliday call “the greatest famine of the 20th century — and of all human recorded history.” Mao, they say, “knowingly starved and worked those tens of millions of people to death.”