Sacha Trudeau's private trip to Tiananmen, his connections to Confucius Institutes and an odd book

How PM Trudeau's brother has infuriated Canada.

Alexandre ‘Sacha’ Trudeau, the younger brother of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told a parliament committee on Wednesday (May 3, 2023) that the Trudeau Foundation is not the target of China’s influence operations and Canadians’ raging discussion about foreign interference right now nothing but a ‘distraction’.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau (left) and his younger brother Alexandre ‘Sacha’ Trudeau (right).

We are not sure about his claims. But what is certain is, Sacha, like his brother and his father, all have a lot of connections with China and all have published books about China. 

Here we are sharing a few fun facts about Sacha’s book, ‘Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China’. 

Sacha’s book is a spin-off project of his father’s.

Left: The cover of the English version of Sacha’s book; Right: the cover of the Chinese version of Sacha’s book.

The English version of ‘Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China’, was published in September 2016 in Canada. 

The Chinese version of it was published in mainland China in June 2019, and the title of the book was changed to ‘From Mystery to Openness: A Journey to Understand Modern China’. On the cover of this Chinese edition, there was a sentence, “Wandering in 10 cities from the south to the north of China. A rising power under the microscope, unexpectedly moving and real.”

Sacha’s book is a travel mémoire based on his 6-week-long trip to China in 2006. In the book, he talked with over 40 Chinese individuals, and the overall tone was dynamic, upbeat, and cheerful, with minimal criticism toward China. It reads like an organic travelogue, but what’s not commonly known is who inspired the creation of the it.

It was China who told Sacha to write the book.