A new edition of a classic book about China, introduced and updated by Alexandre Trudeau, including descriptions from recent trips to the People's Republic.

China has always lingered at the edge of the Western imagination, triggering fear and suspicion as well as exotic hints of the Other. In 1960, Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert, a labour lawyer and a journalist from Montreal, travelled there in the midst of the Great Leap Forward. In 1968, when their book about their travels, Two Innocents in Red China, came out in English, the labour lawyer had become prime minister of Canada. "It seemed to us imperative that the citizens of our democracy should know more about China," Trudeau wrote in the foreword. Two years later, he established diplomatic relations with the world's most populous country state, a move other Western nations would soon follow.

Now, as the country joins the global economy with hurricane force, its 1.3 billion citizens become avid consumers-and polluters-and its diaspora and military weight begin to influence international affairs, particularly in countries such as Canada, China is taking on a whole new persona. This is the conundrum which fascinated Trudeau and Hébert in 1960, and it is the frontier which has beckoned Trudeau's second son, Alexandre, back to China, to put his father's book into context and observe the emerging global power with fresh eyes. Travelling in the adventurous spirit of his father, visiting burgeoning cities and remote corners by bus and train, Trudeau spent eight weeks wandering China over the summer and fall of 2006. Chance dictated his itinerary; his focus was meeting people, his purpose to honour his father's perceptions and the spirit of that earlier journey. The result is a classic Canadian travel adventure brought freshly alive, a seminal early encounter with China resituated within the Canadian imagination.

Alexandre Trudeau has written twenty thousand words of new text, comprising an extended introduction and a reflective epilogue bracketing the original book, which is reproduced in its entirety in a handsome new design with the original photographs.

ALEXANDRE TRUDEAU is the second son of the late Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau. Born on Christmas day, 1973, he was raised in Montreal and obtained a philosophy degree from McGill University. A film-maker and contributing editor at Maclean's magazine, he has reported from Iraq, Liberia, Haiti, and Israel. He covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq from Baghdad, producing a sixty-minute documentary for CTV, Embedded in Iraq. For The Fence, his following documentary, Alexandre lived with two families on opposing sides of the new wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories. A director of Canada World Youth and of the Trudeau Foundation, Trudeau has recently focused attention on the abuse of civil liberties inherent in the Canadian government's use of security certificates to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, without trial, based on secret evidence. He lives in Montreal.

Born in 1923, JACQUES HEBERT is a Canadian author, journalist, publisher, politician and world traveller who has visited more than 130 countries. He was Senator from 1983 to 1998. Hébert founded two Quebec publishing houses, Editions de l'Homme and Editions du Jour, and Canada World Youth and Katimavik; he went on a 21-day hunger strike when the latter program was scrapped in 1987. He recently returned from an extended stay in Cuba to Montreal, where he lives.

PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU was the Prime Minister of Canada from April, 1968 to June, 1979, and from March, 1980 to June, 1984. He died in 2000.