Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.
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 h
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Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative under Donald Trump, reflects on his decision to launch the trade war with China and begin the process of "strategic decoupling" — a process he says the U.S. must see through to the end.
