Chinese Billionaire Who Donated $1 Million to Trudeau Foundation Wanted to Build Mao Statue in Montreal
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Zhang Bin, the Chinese billionaire and political adviser to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who made a $1 million “donation” to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, wanted to build a joint monument featuring the dictator Mao Zedong and the former Canadian prime minister at the University of Montreal.
Approximately $50,000 was originally earmarked for a statue commemorating the elder Trudeau that was intended to be built in front of the college’s law school. However, Zhang reportedly proposed an alteration. “They [Zhang] suggested one of Trudeau and Mao together,” Geneviève O’Meara, a spokeswoman representing the University of Montreal confirmed for the Globe & Mail on Tuesday.
Zhang made the contribution following the 2015 Canadian federal election which brought Justin Trudeau to power and attended a later fundraiser in Toronto which the prime minister was at.
Chairman Mao Zedong, also known as the Great Helmsman, was the founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and presided over the country from 1943 until his death in 1976. Mao imposed crippling policies on the largely agrarian country known as the Great Leap Forward in a bid to rapidly modernize.
“Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them,” the historian Frank Dikötter explained in an article in History Today.
However, the Great Leap Forward devastated the newly independent country and claimed the lives of millions of people.
“What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962,” Dikötter notes.
Reporting in recent weeks by the Globe & Mail as well as Global News have revealed that China engaged in a sophisticated election meddling campaign in Canada ahead of the 2021 federal election which saw Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party hold onto power.
Sources from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s equivalent to the CIA, shared with journalists information that Chinese diplomats made undeclared donations during Canadian political campaigns and recruited local business owners to hire international students for campaigning purposes reported last week.
The primary objective of the CCP was to deprive the Conservative Party of victory, which it viewed as taking a tougher stance on issues such as the sovereignty of Taiwan or human rights in Hong Kong, compared with the incumbent Liberals.
“Most important, the intelligence reports show that Beijing was determined that the Conservatives did not win. China employed disinformation campaigns and proxies connected to Chinese-Canadian organizations in Vancouver and the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], which have large mainland Chinese immigrant communities, to voice opposition to the Conservatives and favour the Trudeau Liberals,” journalists Robert Fife and Steven Chase wrote.
Part of the election interference effort included the dissemination of anti-Conservative political messages through local Chinese-language media including statements such as: “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC can support.”
Prime Minister Trudeau has sought to dismiss calls for a public inquiry into the matter by denouncing critics as needlessly politicizing the matter. “It’s not about one party versus another,” Trudeau said earlier this week.
Trudeau’s associates also sought to parallel recent American debates over election integrity. “This is the same Trump-type tactics to question election results moving forward,” Jennifer O’Connell, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of intergovernmental affairs, stated.
