Retired prof shares his decades-long passion for China
Memoir mixes expert analysis with colourful yarns
When Taber farm boy Brian Evans arrived at the University of Alberta as a first-year student in 1951, he knew exactly what he wanted to study: Chinese history.
But when the earnest teenager told the acting head of the history department of his ambitions, his professor was perplexed.
“Why?” he asked Evans. “There isn’t a future in it.”
Evans has spent the better part of the last 61 years proving his former professor wrong — along the way becoming one of Canada’s foremost experts on Chinese history and culture. After taking his undergraduate degree at the U of A, he went on to earn a PHD in Chinese history at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He become the U of A’s first Chinese history professor, founded the department of East Asian languages and literatures, and served as associate vice-president.
When Canada opened its first post-revolution embassy in Beijing, he spent two years posted there as resident Sinologist.
Over the decades, Evans has witnessed China’s extraordinary evolution, from its early years of Chairman Mao to the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, to its tentative opening the West, to its metamorphosis as a global economic superpower.
Through it all, he’s never lost his love for China, its history, its food and its people, a romance that began back in Taber, when his best friend was Herbert How, whose parents ran the Chinese café. That love story is the backbone of Evans’s latest book, Pursuing China: Memoir of a Beaver
Liaison Officer. It’s no dry academic tome. Instead, Evans mixes his analysis of China’s history and geopolitics with raucous yarns, recounting his personal adventures and misadventures, at home and abroad.
It’s quite a departure for the internationally respected scholar, who hadn’t published a humour piece since his student days, writing satire for The Gateway. “I knew I could write that way, but I never thought it was of any use,” he laughs.
Evans spent years studying China, before he actually visited. In the years immediately after Mao’s revolution, it wasn’t easy for westerners to win visas. It was 1964 before Evans got to make his first trip.
“I was just thrilled to be in China. Who wouldn’t be, if you’d dreamed of being there all your life?” he says. “It was only 15 years after the revolution. I found a country with a very depressed economy, because of Mao’s bad policies, but whose people were very idealistic, very committed to building their country.”
He ate his first dim sum and his first Peking duck, and tried out his Mandarin. Some of his U of A colleagues worried he’d come back a brain-washed Commie. Instead, he was both disturbed by the Mao regime’s relentless propaganda and impressed by the optimism of the ordinary people he met.
“When I saw the people, and saw their idealism, I felt that if anybody could pull it o , they could. I thought if anybody could build a society that wasn’t prey to consumerism, they could. I thought the personal car, for example, would never come to China. Boy, was I wrong.”
Despite his best efforts, it took Evans another nine years before he could get back to China. This time, he was able to join the sta at the reopened Canadian Embassy — as resident China scholar, and, for a time, as official beaver liaison officer — which put him in charge of ensuring that Canada’s gift of four bucktoothed beavers arrived at the Beijing Zoo safe and sound. But in many ways, Evans has been a beaver liaison o cer his whole career, beavering away to build and shore up Chinese-canadian relationships.
While Albertans have long understood the economic and cultural importance of China to Western Canada’s future, Evans says it’s always been harder to convince Quebec and Ontario.
“The East didn’t see, and to an extent still doesn’t see, the value of relations with China,” he says. “Peter Lougheed was really a leader on this. He knew you had to be aware of each other, that culture was how you built diplomatic and economic ties. No one else has had quite the style of Lougheed, and his ability to think more broadly.”
Evans is particularly critical of the Harper government’s stop-and- start dealings with China. Trudeau, Mulroney, Chretien and Martin, says Evans, all understood the value of a strong relationship with China.
“We had a lot of momentum. Then Mr. Harper came in and said, ‘Well, we’re going to do this di erently.’ I know he was hamstrung by the hard rock in the party, but Harper really hammered them over the head, for the benefit of his base in Canada.”
China’s leaders, says Evans, were politically astute enough to understand Harper was playing to a home audience. That didn’t mean they appreciated the snub. Though the Harper government has now changed is posture toward China — and even been rewarded for its more conciliatory position, with a promise of pandas — Evans says Canada has to stop patronizing its vital trade partner.
“We still have this missionary attitude, that we have things to teach them. They are the inheritors of 5,000 years of continuous civilization, and here we are, telling them, ‘You should do this. You should not do that.’ And not realizing we are being o ensive.”
“When people tell me what we have to teach the Chinese, I just want to grab them by the throat and say, ‘Let’s go to Shanghai.’ ”
Predicting China’s future is no easy task. But Evans says he doesn’t expect a Jasmine Revolution any time soon — but perhaps a slow political evolution toward something more like democracy. “There are demonstrations and protests daily in parts of China. And they’ve been experimenting with open civic elections in the north for some time. The changes are subtle, but they’re happening at Chinese speed. The Chinese don’t want chaos. They look at Russia and say ‘We don’t want that here.’ ”
At 79, Evans himself is hardly slowing down. He’s just finished a new book, a biography of Canadian missionary, politician and diplomat Chester Ronning. Now, he’s at work documenting the history of the first wave of Chinese immigration to Alberta. An adjunct professor at two Chinese universities, in May, he flies back to China for a lecture tour — with another planned for October. He still finds time for dim sum, about three times a week.
“We need to be alert, always, to what’s going on in China,” Evans says. “The Chinese aren’t there to make us rich. The Chinese are looking after their own house. But if we can help? Well, as the old Maoist saying goes, ‘Learn from each other.’ ”