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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. and death-rates) would continue throughout eternity!
We don’t know if these images are still current today, or if children still advise each other not to breathe the tainted air if they pass an Oriental in the street. But we are compelled to remark that the adult world around us is unconsciously inspired by the same phantasms, all the more now that the Yellow Peril flies the red flag of Bolshevism. Under the influence of this dual fear, our conduct is doubly irrational: in politics we refuse to recognize the existence of those who rule a quarter—soon to be a third—of the human race, and we don’t deign to sit with them in the councils of the nations; in economics we hesitate to increase our trading relations with the most formidable reservoir of consumption and production that has ever existed; in spiritual matters we are perpetuating the established identification between Christianity and the most reactionary interests of the West, notably in linking the future of a certain kind of missionary effort to the (unimaginable) return to power of Chiang Kai-shek.
That China is still an object of fear is betrayed even in everyday conversation. Before our departure, people seriously told us: “You are courageous to go over there!” At first we thought this was mockery, directed against frivolous travellers by those who were courageously keeping their noses to the grindstone. But no; other expressions used taught us what daring we were apparently displaying: “Have you made your will? Accidents happen so quickly.” “It is easier to go behind the iron curtain than to come out again.” “Aren’t you afraid of being held as hostages?”
In all humility we couldn’t bring ourselves to take these stories seriously. Besides, we each had in our possession a document belonging to the Canadian government, in which the Secretary of State for External Affairs of Canada requested under his seal and “in the name of Her Majesty the Queen” that the authorities of “all countries” should “allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance” and should “afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.” Armed with such a precious safe-conduct, we didn’t see why we should be bothered at presenting ourselves at the border of any country at all. Besides, as the ensuing history is going to show, the Chinese took infinite precautions to ensure our return home safe and sound. They seemed to be afraid that, if one of us chanced to drown in the Grand Canal or idiotically fell off the Great Wall, a certain section of the Western press would draw dramatic conclusions about the danger of restoring diplomatic relations with a country where the life of a “French-Canadian Catholic” was held so cheap.
In reality the only fear that we might possibly have thought reasonable was that of being denounced and vilified by compatriots on our return ex partibus infidelium. And it is a fact that out of a hundred French Canadians invited to go on this trip the previous spring (true, this was before the fall of the Union Nationale government), fewer than twenty dared to answer, and more than half of them refused.
But it must be said that on this score the authors of the present volume were pretty well immune to reprisals by this time. Since both of them had been generously reproved, knocked off, and abolished in the integralist and reactionary press in consequence of earlier journeys behind the iron curtain, the prospect of being assassinated yet again on their return from China was hardly likely to impress them.
All in all, we two, who had never travelled together before but between us had been four times round the world, sailed nearly all the seas, explored five continents extensively, and visited every country of the earth except Portugal, Rumania, and Paraguay, discovered that we entertained the same outlandish philosophy of travel: we believed that those who have toured a country observantly and in good faith are in some danger of knowing more about it than those who haven’t been there.
And it seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China. If when we were children the grownups had told us anything besides rubbish on this subject, and if they themselves had ever been encouraged to reflect that the unthinkable sufferings of the Chinese people deserved something more from the West than postage stamps,