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Canada and China: Interconnected 

By Barbara Black

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In 1975, some people wanted to name this place Norman Bethune University. However, “Concordia” was chosen instead.

The charismatic surgeon’s reputation has gone up and down dramatically since his death in China in 1939 from blood poisoning. The mid-’70s were probably its apex, both in Canada, where his left-wing politics fit the zeitgeist, and in China, where he became a hero of the Cultural Revolution.

Now, as Senator Vivienne Poy wryly remarked, the best-known Canadian in China is Dashan, aka Mark Rowswell of Ottawa, a popular comic actor on Chinese TV.

Similarly, Poy said, Chinese immigration to Canada has gone from the head tax phase of the 19th century, when the men who arrived as labourers could stay only if they paid for the privilege, to more recent times, when Chinese immigrants are generally assumed to be rich.

These dramatic changes were the backdrop for a symposium Nov. 1 to 3, organized with the McCord Museum, at which Concordia professors and students were prominent. The title was The Golden Mountain: Canada and China, Interconnected.

Art historian Loren Lerner, in a talk called The Massaging of a Canadian Memory, described the careful restoration by the Canadian government of Bethune’s family home in Gravenhurst, Ont., as “character dissonance,” because it was so unlike the man it was intended to commemorate.

Bethune’s father was a Presbyterian minister in a quiet, conservative town, exactly what the mercurial son wanted to leave behind. Becoming a controversial Communist battlefield doctor in Spain and China was as far from small-town Ontario as you could get in the 1930s, though he may have inherited his father’s evangelical impulse.

Jesse Radz, who works at the McCord and is doing a Master’s degree in Concordia’s Religion Department on the subject of Jewish Montreal, told the audience about Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, another famous Canadian in China during the same era.

Cohen had a wild life as a petty criminal, first in London’s rough east end and then in western Canada, where he developed Chinese-Canadian friends and learned a bit of the language. He went to China, becoming a bodyguard to the great popular leader Sun Yat-sen and a general in the army of Chiang Kai-chek. Radz says Cohen ended his days sitting in the lobby of Montreal’s Windsor Hotel, telling anyone who would listen about his adventurous life.

The conference included presentations by the following Concordians: art historian Alice Ming Wai Jim, art education professor David Pariser, artist Mary Sui Yee Wong, Chinese program coordinator Lian Duan, and musicians Kevin Austin and Tim Brady.

A number of Concordians were active in organizing this conference. They included Liselyn Adams (Office of the Provost) and Clarence Epstein (Office of the President), as well as Kimberley Manning (Political Science), who in the next two years expects to establish a centre for contemporary Chinese studies at Concordia, and Catherine MacKenzie (Art History), who is going to mount an exhibit in the FOFA Gallery related to Bethune.

In association with the City of Montreal, Concordia will spearhead key events in L’Année de Bethune, which will begin in the fall of 2008 with the completion of Phase I of Place Bethune and will end in the fall of 2009 with international events in Quartier Concordia marking the humanitarian’s death.