IN 2018, HUAWEI top executive and daughter of the founder of the company, Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on foot of a US extradition request. The move prompted a furious reaction from China.
Tensions have escalated since. Shortly after, Beijing arrested two Canadian men in China – they’ve become known as ‘two Michaels’ – Spavor and Kovrig were detained in China under state secrets law. They’ve since faced long-term detention and interrogation.
Meanwhile, a Chinese court violated normal procedures by commuting the 15-year sentence of another Canadian citizen, Robert Schellenberg, to a death sentence. More recently, when Meng’s extradition case entered its critical stage, a Chinese court sentenced Michael Spavor to 11 years in prison for espionage and for illegally providing intelligence.
The Chinese government has been repeatedly pressuring Canada to release Meng Wanzhou. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that “Huawei is a 100 per cent private enterprise” and that “suppressing Huawei is a typical act of economic bullying”.
To defend such a “private enterprise”, the Chinese government has spared no effort. In August 2020, Canadian citizen Ye Jianhui was sentenced to death for transporting and manufacturing drugs. The Communist Party of China (CCP) has taken foreign nationals in China as a hostage in exchange for Meng’s release.
“I happened to be in Shanghai when the two were arrested,” said Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a former Canadian official.
“I found my suitcase had been searched. I told a local friend about the arrest, and that friend told me that the Chinese government has a blacklist of 100 Canadians who can be arrested as hostages at any time.”
As seen in the Chinese government’s choice of timing, their public statements about Huawei, Beijing has made little secret of “hostage diplomacy”. This has sent shockwaves through Canada and its allies, but it is not new or an isolated case at all. Besides political and legal methods, Beijing did not hesitate to use both economic bullying and judicial kidnappings.
Back in 2014, China imprisoned Canadian couple Julia and Kevin Garratt in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Chinese millionaire, Su Bin, in July that year. Su, who joined Chinese military hackers in their effort to steal blueprints of Pentagon military aircraft parts, was extradited from Canada to the United States and later sentenced to 46 months.
Global tensions
Australia was one of the first countries to be alert to and counter the Chinese government’s accelerating expansion of its infiltration overseas. In 2018, the Australian parliament legislated to punish foreign interference crimes, banned political parties from receiving foreign donations, and required foreign political organisations or entities to be registered to lobby. The CCP’s influential operations became the direct targets.
In April 2020, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called on the international community to launch an independent international investigation into the source of the coronavirus. Previously, the Australian government banned Huawei from participating in the 5G networks construction in 2018 for national security grounds. It has become the first country to issue a ban on Huawei.
Not a surprise, Beijing fought back. Within months of the Australian Prime Minister’s call for an investigation into the source of Covid-19, China began an anti-dumping investigation into Australian wine.
In November, it announced high tariffs on Australian wine and restrictions on imports of Australian beef, barley and coal, with obvious political aims. Beijing also arrested Australian citizen and writer Yang Hengjun in January 2019, and Australian journalist Cheng Lei, in August 2020. A poet and publisher Gui Minhai, a Swedish passport holder, was kidnapped from Thailand by the CCP’s secret police after his publications provoked the wrath of Xi Jinping and other CCP officials. Lee Bo, a bookstore clerk with a British passport, is widely believed to have been abducted from Hong Kong.
Gui renounced his Swedish citizenship under severe torture. After spending two years in prison, he was released, but was re-arrested in front of European diplomats and later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, while all consular service was denied. The world has not realised the terror in these details and as a whole. A foreign citizen, living in a foreign country, was abducted by Chinese secret agents, sent back to China, tortured and forced to give up the foreign citizenship. This is a brazen offence of dignity and a huge threat to the safety of every foreigner.
After travelling back to China in 2018, two American citizens, Cynthia and Victor Liu were prevented from leaving China. Beijing used the “exit bans” as a means to pressure their father – a high-profile Chinese fugitive – into returning to China.
Trade war games
In retaliation for South Korea’s deployment of the THAAD missile system in 2007, the Chinese government stopped staging Korean dramas, prohibited Korean artists from performing in China, and encouraged people to boycott Lotte supermarkets. National Tourism Administration urgently stopped all travel to South Korea.
Another famous case is restricting imports of Norwegian salmon as a retaliation against the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. Don’t forget another Canadian citizen, Huseyincan Celil, an Uyghur who was arrested in Uzbekistan, extradited to China in 2006 against the objections of the Canadian government, and sentenced to life in prison on fake charges of terrorism.
Make no mistake. The hostages are not only foreign citizens. The Chinese government, in practice, has taken its own people as hostages for decades. Releasing political prisoners was always Beijing’s bargaining chip on the negotiation table, especially after the Tiananmen Massacre. Fang Lizhi, China’s Sakhalov, was not allowed to leave China for one year after he entered the US Embassy following the massacre.
As Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo documented, the first early release of Xu Wenli and Wei Jingsheng was related to Beijing’ 1993 Olympic bid; Wang Juntao’s release on medical parole in 1994 was linked to the USA’s granting most favourite nation (MFN) trade status to China; Wei Jingsheng’s second release became a bargaining chip for Jiang Zemin’s eager visit to the US; Wang Dan and Liu Nianchun’s release on medical parole was a reward for Clinton’s visit to China in 1998.
Releasing one and capturing more, such hostage diplomacy is both cruel and nasty. There is never a shortage of political hostages in Chinese prisons.
The president of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, found that his younger brother Hushtar, in Xinjiang, was recently sentenced to life in prison. “It was connected to my activism, surely,” Dolkun said.
Similarly, Gulshan Abbas was sentenced to 20 years, it’s widely believed as a retaliation against her sister, Rushan Abbas’s speaking out for Uyghur people’s human rights. More than 50 relatives of Uyghur journalists of Radio Free Asia have been detained in Xinjiang, with some held in detention camps and others sentenced to prison.
Most overseas Chinese, no matter what kinds of citizenship, have at least one family member living in mainland China. We have to censor ourselves for fear of the personal safety of our Chinese family members. There have been many lessons the world should learn from Beijing’s “hostage diplomacy” and economic coercion.
Even after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, most politicians and scholars still assumed that China would grow more free and open and become a democracy – as long as the world encouraged and allowed China to engage in the international legal system and the World Trade Organisation.
However, “economic liberty leads to political freedom” has proven part of the “China fantasy,” as journalist James Mann argued 13 years ago. Political naivety and business opportunism at the expense of human rights heavily contributed to the rise of an anti-democratic China.
Two Chinas
For the past three decades, China has made amazing achievements in economic and social development but the CCP has explicitly and firmly refused the ideas and reforms of liberal democracy.
The human rights situation has been deteriorating. What’s happening in Xinjiang – the ongoing Uyghur genocide – is arguably the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. It’s hard not to recognise the failure of the engagement policy towards China, but in my opinion, unprincipled engagement with an autocratic regime is nearly appeasement.
Huawei is not a private company, though it was legally registered as such. The trials of two Michaels are not about law, but merely producing bargaining chips. The overseas outlets operated by the CCP are not media, but a propaganda machine. The Belt and Road Initiative is less an economic project, than a political stratagem. Beijing is eager to host Olympics not because of the love of sports, but the needs of a propaganda bonanza. Beijing has ratified dozens of international human rights treaties, not for abiding by them, but for manipulating them. At the UN or any international fora, the Chinese government represents the interest of, not the Chinese people, but a small privileged group of the Party.
These are simple facts, but the world has been misguided and confused for too long. Some have realised China’s threat to global freedom and democracy, but far from enough.
Once the world sees the CCP more clearly, feasible and powerful actions can be found easily: reducing economic reliance on China, boycotting Beijing Olympics, banning products of forced labour, supporting prisoners of conscience and rights activists, stop selling surveillance technologies to Beijing, not voting China into the Human Rights Council, passing Magnitsky-style laws, not repatriating Uyghurs and Turkic people to China, not providing a safe haven to corrupt officials and human rights abuses, and so on and so on.
If Canada surrenders to Beijing’s bullying, the Chinese authorities will get a message that hostage-taking is working and they will resort to more kidnappings and blackmails. Canada needs more support.
Anyone single free country seems not able to confront the profound challenge that the rising regime has brought to the world, so it’s immensely important and urgent to build up more proactive and value-based democratic allies.
Teng Biao is Pozen Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and a human rights lawyer.
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