Shotgun: Early Business with Beijing

Link and do not miss reading the whole Western Standard Shotgun article:

Early Business with Beijing

One of the benefits of doing a large cover story like the Western Standard's current "Puppets of Beijing" is that people start contacting you with information that supplements the overall picture. While it would have been nice to have the info before the thing went to press, nevertheless I appreciate the effort people take to point out this or that fact, correct me, or give me references to other sources, etc. In the long run all this is of tremendous help because it expands the base of credible sources in case the story must be revisited.

One such fact came to light recently is on point with the story. It shows an early business interest that now-embattled UN advisor Maurice Strong (also an advisor to Paul Martin) had in China back in the pre-Deng Xiaoping 'capitalist' reform days (that began roughly in 1978). It is from the book Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP by Thomas Walkom, 1994. The excerpt is from Chapter 13: "Mo of the Jungle: On and off the privatization bandwagon":

By the 1970s, Strong had been picked by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to head Petro-Canada, the new state-owned oil company which the NDP of David Lewis (Stephen's father) had demanded as their price for keeping the minority Liberals in power. In November 1976, as Mao Tse-tung's widow and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four were about to be arrested in Beijing, a company linked to Strong was flying antiquities, gold, furniture, and jewelry out of China.

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