OTTAWA — Chinese premier Zhu Rongji discarded a prepared speech at a 1998 dinner in Beijing and spontaneously declared Canada to be China’s “best friend” while seated directly between prime minister Jean Chrétien and Chrétien’s son-in-law, Power Corporation executive André Desmarais, according to the Canadian diplomat assigned to record Zhu’s remarks.
But Zhu’s declaration did not appear in the account published by the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily.
Charles Burton, the veteran diplomat and China scholar who attended the dinner as an official note-taker, told The Bureau Tuesday that People’s Daily instead published Zhu’s unused prepared speech the following day. Its account also omitted Zhu’s off-the-cuff response to a Time magazine profile warning that his aggressive economic reforms had carried him dangerously close to the political sun.
Burton disclosed the circumstances after reading Desmarais’s tribute to Zhu, published in La Presse and The Globe and Mail following Zhu’s death on August 12 at 97.
Zhu’s death drew tributes from around the world to the technocrat who led China into the World Trade Organization and helped transform the country into the world’s factory.
Desmarais’s tribute stands apart among them, both for its intimacy and for what it says about relations between Beijing, Ottawa and Washington.
It is also illuminating for Canadians seeking to understand Ottawa’s long-standing approach to Communist China—and the influence of a Montreal corporate and political network that championed deeper engagement with Beijing.
Desmarais describes Zhu as an uncle-like figure, mentor and intimate friend. Burton’s account provides a rare firsthand window into how the statement underpinning that narrative was actually delivered.
“The text [of] Zhu’s upcoming dinner speech was placed at each table setting,” Burton recalled. “I got out a sharpened pencil to note if he left any of it out or added any asides.”
“Then Zhu completely ignored the prepared text.”
Burton was also struck by Zhu’s position at the table.
André Desmarais was then head of the Canada China Business Council, Burton said. Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister, was his father-in-law.
The Chinese premier sat directly between them.
“I am pretty sure that the CCP took the father-in-law/son-in-law [relationship] as a significant factor,” Burton wrote in comments to The Bureau.
“I was a bit thrown to see Premier of the State Council Zhu dead centre between them.”
The tableau compressed a powerful Canada–China network into a single seating arrangement: the Chinese premier, Canada’s head of government and a leading member of the Montreal corporate dynasty that had spent years developing commercial and political relationships with Beijing.
Power Corporation was among the Canadian companies that founded the Canada China Business Council in 1978. Paul Desmarais served as its founding chairman. André Desmarais later led the organization and remains its honorary chairman.
Desmarais also recalls Zhu warning in a speech that an eagle flying too close to the sun would burn and be reduced to ashes. Everyone present, Desmarais writes, understood the eagle to represent the United States, and Canada to be the steady partner on which China could rely.
The anecdote casts America as the arrogant power destined to fall, while Canada emerges as Beijing’s trusted and dependable alternative. That interpretation has immediate resonance as Prime Minister Mark Carney holds last-minute talks with Washington to avert threatened 50 percent American tariffs.
But Burton says there was no reference to the United States in Zhu’s remarks that night.
The eagle was Zhu himself.
Less than a month before Chrétien’s November 1998 visit, Time published a profile titled China’s Missing Pieces. It compared powerful men to Icarus and identified Zhu as China’s most daring “highflyer”—a reformer in danger of crashing under political resistance, unemployment and unrest.
At the dinner, Burton said, Zhu jokingly rebutted that characterization. Seated between Chrétien and Desmarais, he suggested that the Canadian prime minister could see Zhu had neither burnt feathers nor the smell of roasted chicken.
“The Icarus metaphor of ‘flying too close to the sun’ was famously applied to Zhu Rongji by Time magazine in October 1998,” Burton said.
“There was no reference to the United States in Mr. Zhu’s remarks that night. None of his refuting of the Time Magazine piece or his Canada is best friend of China assertion made it into the official record,” Burton said.
For Burton, the 1998 dinner was emblematic of something larger.
“Zhu Rongji’s premiership marked the golden age of highly lucrative relationships between the Canadian Laurentian elite and Chinese Communist business networks,” he told The Bureau.
Under Xi Jinping’s neo-Leninist redirection of China’s political economy, Burton added, a new mercantilism focused on domestic investment has taken hold, and Canadian industrialists are no longer the “valued partners and friends” they may have naively believed themselves to be 30 years ago.
Nearly three decades after Burton saw Chrétien seated beside Zhu and Desmarais, the former prime minister was again in Beijing, The Bureau has reported.
On the eve of Carney’s January 2026 visit, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig drew attention to Chrétien’s private meeting with Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng only days before Carney’s arrival.
Kovrig described Chrétien as a possible “warm-up act” for the official mission. He emphasized Chrétien’s close connections to Power Corporation and the CCBC and characterized the circumstances as a possible effort by “certain business interests to deepen trade and investment.”
“Canadians should watch closely what sort of dealmaking follows,” Kovrig said, as reported by The Bureau.
Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute has recounted an even blunter warning.
Crowley said the late David Kilgour told him that, upon becoming minister of state for Asia-Pacific under Chrétien, Kilgour received a visit from a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“Our policy toward China, he was told in no uncertain terms, is set not at our foreign ministry or the PMO, but at the headquarters of Power Corporation in Montreal,” Crowley wrote.
That is Crowley’s account of Kilgour’s recollection, but the relationships themselves are documented.
