Red China Blues
John K. Fairbank, reviewing Edgar Snow’s first book, Journey to the Beginning, describes him as a reporter who avoids the “oversimplicity of the library researcher … and of the columnist who has to know what he thinks in the first place.” As…
Canada’s Answer to the Cultural Revolution
The best night of my posting as the purveyor of Canadian culture to China came in May of 1994 in the distinctly non- Canadian and non-Chinese surroundings of the original Beijing franchise of Maxim’s de Paris. I had arranged for Montreal jazz…
Bicycles in Shanghai
by Richard Belliveau
An Asian Day is Over / Une journée en Asie c’est déjà terminée
The ADM returns to his office. He stops to ask one of the officers how the trade awards went in Indonesia. No word until tomorrow. It is now about nine o’clock in the evening in most of the Asian posts. The Asian…
Human Rights and Trade Relations: A Personal Commentary
The Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. The Canadian Ambassador to China at this time remembers how the crisis was managed and offers his own personal views on human rights and trade relations.
Profession: Canadian Foreign Correspondent
Ben Tierney has one of those rare occupations in Canada — a foreign correspondent for Canadian newspapers. Before he retired to a cottage in Scotland, Neil Reeder and Michael Welsh caught up with him in Hong Kong and were able to turn…
Petits croquis de Beijing
Le monde a changé : le marché de la soie de Beijing (qui se répand continuellement dans les allées et sur les trottoirs d’un quartier central), est régulièrement pris d’assaut par de jeunes capitalistes russes à l’allure déterminée et armés d’énormes sacs.…
Through the Korean Looking-Glass
“We may be the first Canadian officials to visit Pyongyang since the Korean War,” said my enthusiastic companion, Gordon Houlden, who had just managed to manoeuvre himself to be the first off the plane so as not to be deprived of his…
Reluctant Adversaries
Canada is now at one of the lowest points in our long relationship with China. Canada’s offer of permanent residence to PRC citizens unwilling to return to China after June 1989 and her strong stand on human rights issues have irked the…
Alvin: A Biography of the Hon. Alvin Hamilton, P.C.
As Patrick Kyba notes in the introduction to his recent biography of Alvin Hamilton, the craft of Canadian political biography has focused almost exclusively on national and provincial political leaders. Individuals like Alvin Hamilton, whose contribution as a cabinet minister was critical…
