The Limits of Alliance: Cold War Solidarity and Canadian Wheat Exports to China, 1950–1963

Abstract

Although Canada was a committed member of the western alliance and publically supported Washington, DC’s efforts to isolate communist China, Ottawa embarked on large-scale wheat sales to Beijing in the late 1950s in the face of sustained US opposition. Drawing on a broad range of archival records, this paper explores the three main factors that encouraged the Canadian government in this course: growing doubts about the wisdom of isolating communist China; mounting anger at Washington, DC’s use of subsidized wheat sales to capture traditional Canadian markets; and a surging sense of Canadian nationalism that sought a distinct role for Canada on the world stage. Clearly, as was so often the case in postwar Canadian foreign economic policy, a narrowly defined national interest easily trumped the ideological pressures of western solidarity.

The Origin of Education Exchange between China and Canada

“…Therefore, the establishment of a cultural exchange mechanism with Canada, a western developed country, is not only the need of national interests, but also a bilateral cooperation that Premier Zhou Enlai is willing to promote. [24]…”