Chinese Donors to Trudeau Foundation Asked for Statue of Mao to Be Erected at University of Montreal: Report

Universite de Montreal's campus is seen Nov. 14, 2017, in Montreal. The Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz

A CCP-linked Chinese billionaire who donated to the alma mater of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and toward erecting a statue of him, also wanted the university to put up a statue of former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.

Jeff Heinrich, a spokesperson for the University of Montreal, told The Epoch Times that the institution in 2016 received $550,000 from Zhang Bin and another donor, Niu Gensheng, which went toward establishing the Bin Zhang-Niu Gensheng Chinese-Canadian Scholarship Fund, although a final payment of $250,000 was never made.

The university declined the request to build the Mao statue.

Heinrich also noted that the university had no knowledge of the donation allegedly coming at the behest of a Chinese official, as reported recently in a Globe and Mail report citing a national security source.

“At the time we received this donation—and remember, it was a time when there was a greater economic and scientific openness in Canada-China relations—we had no indication of any possible link between the donation and political interference by a foreign country,” he said in an email. The issue was first reported by the Globe and Mail.

According to the Globe, Zhang was instructed by a Chinese diplomat to donate $1 million to the Trudeau Foundation, and that Beijing would reimburse him for the amount. The report adds that the conversation was captured by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 2014, soon after Trudeau became Liberal leader in 2013, and that the diplomat and Zhang had discussed the upcoming 2015 federal election, and the possibility that the Liberals could defeat the Conservatives to form government.

Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau shakes hands with Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong on Oct.13, 1973. The two met at Zhongnanhai in Beijing while Trudeau was on an official visit to China. AP Photo

Zhang was a guest at a Liberal Party cash-for-access fundraiser event in 2016 with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Shortly after the 2016 fundraiser, Zhang and Niu donated $1 million to “honour the memory and leadership” of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, the Globe says. The amount was split for different initiatives, including the building of Pierre Trudeau’s statue, a donation to set up a scholarship at the University of Montreal’s faculty of law, where the former prime minister had attended as a student and was later an instructor, and a donation to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

In a September 2016 newsletter produced by the University of Montreal’s law school, Zhang and Niu were seen in a photo posing with Guy Breton, former rector of the University of Montreal, Alexandre Trudeau, then director and member of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Peng Jingtao, then consul-general of China in Montreal, and Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens, who was the University of Montreal’s Dean of the Faculty of Law from 2015 to 2019.

The photo accompanied a French-language article saying the donation “aims to honour the memory and leadership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was one of the first leaders to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1970.”

CCP Ties

Zhang is listed as the president of the China Cultural Industry Association, a non-profit group based in Beijing. The association’s website also says he was a member of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top political advisory body that serves as a central part of the United Front Work Department, which is the CCP’s primary foreign interference tool, according to a report posted by Public Safety Canada citing research from think tanks.

The Epoch Times reached out to Zhang for comment but didn’t hear back.

The Black Book of Communism, which documents the history of political repression by communist states, says that Mao and the communist regime in Beijing are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people.

“There were between 6 million and 10 million deaths as a direct result of the Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans,” according to the book.

“To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward—estimates range from 20 million to 43 million dead for the years 1959-1961—all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects.”