Who’s in the Middle of a Spat Between the U.S. and China? Canada

By CATHERINE PORTER, DAN BILEFSKY and RICK GLADSTONE 9 hrs ago Strasbourg reopens Christmas market after gunman killed EU leaders reject May's idea to salvage her Brexit deal

© Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Chinese police patrolling in front of the Canadian embassy in Beijing on Wednesday after a second Canadian was detained on suspicion of “engaging in activities that harm China’s national security.”

TORONTO — The United States and China are embroiled in a tense trade war that seemed headed for escalation after the United States accused a top Chinese technology executive of fraud.

Who has China lashed out at?

Canada.

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Furious at the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, a top executive at Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, China has seized at least two Canadians. Chinese social media users are clamoring for a boycott of Canada’s products. Anxious Canadians are wondering if they should scrap trips to China or urge relatives there to come home.

Canada is in a tricky spot, boxed in the middle between its two largest trading partners, and worried about having to choose sides.

After feeling burned by negotiations to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, the country is trying to strengthen trade relations with China in part to lessen dependence on economic ties to the United States. And many Canadians are wary of what they consider President Trump’s capricious view of Canada.

“Canada is between a rock and a hard place,” said Wenran Jiang, a senior fellow at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been chilly at best this year. Now, with the extradition process unfolding in the next months, Mr. Trudeau risks alienating China as well.

As of Thursday evening there was no word on where China was holding the two seized Canadians, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spovar, a writer and entrepreneur. Canadian consular officials have not been able to see them.

Both face charges of undermining China’s national security.

China’s announcement that it was holding them further complicated what has now become a crisis entangling all three countries. It arose from the bitter trade dispute between China and the United States and the American extradition case against Ms. Meng, who was arrested nearly two weeks ago.

© Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, arriving at a parole office with a security guard on Wednesday in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Ms. Meng, an affluent business celebrity in China, was freed on bail Tuesday by a court in Vancouver, where she was detained at the request of the United States on suspicion of violating American sanctions against Iran. When or whether she will be extradited remains unclear.

Unswayed by the bail release, China has demanded that Canada free Ms. Meng immediately, seeing her arrest as a sneaky political ploy engineered by the Americans.

Canada has said it was abiding by the laws governing an extradition agreement with the United States. But that reasoning has only further infuriated China.

The anger was seen in an opinion piece by China’s ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, published Thursday in the Globe and Mail.

“The detention of Ms. Meng is not a mere judicial case, but a premeditated political action in which the United States wields its regime power to witch-hunt a Chinese high-tech company out of political consideration,” Mr. Lu wrote. “The so-called long-arm jurisdiction of the United States, however, has no legal basis in international law.”

Those who accuse China of retaliatory detentions over Ms. Meng’s arrest, he suggested, “should first reflect on the actions of the Canadian side.” He added, “It is both ignominious and hypocritical to revile China with double standards.”

Mr. Jiang said that to many Chinese, it appeared — fairly or not — that Canada had been “doing the dirty work of the Americans, in what seems like a tactic for a U.S. trade war with China.”

A former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, said the dispute would likely worsen and beckon an economic backlash by China, the world’s second largest economy behind the United States.

“They will start to increase pressure, canceling contracts maybe stopping shipments to China of key exports like canola, pork and beef,” Mr. Saint-Jacques said.

Some suggested Ms. Meng’s challenge to extradition had been strengthened because of a remark by Mr. Trump in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump implied he would intervene in her extradition if it would help land a trade deal with China. By tying the two, Mr. Trump may have inadvertently given Ms. Meng a way to avoid extradition by arguing that her arrest is a politically motivated case, in which the bar for extradition is far higher.

“He’s handed ammunition to Ms. Meng’s lawyers,” said Robert Currie, a professor of law with expertise on extradition at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Normally extraditions to the United States are not much of an issue in Canada and are mostly granted.

But Ms. Meng’s lawyers could argue that “she’s being used as a proxy in a trade war, and we’re not sure she will get a fair trial in the United States,” Professor Currie said. “It’s not just about criminal law anymore. It’s about politics.”

Foreign Minister Chystia Freeland of Canada clearly saw the implications of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

“Our extradition partners should not seek to politicize the extradition process or use it for ends other than the pursuit of justice,” she told a news conference on Wednesday.

On Friday, Ms. Freeland is scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington, part of a previously scheduled dialogue that also includes the top defense officials from the two governments. The subject of Ms. Meng, the two Canadian detainees in China and pressure from the Chinese government will no doubt be discussed.

The arrests in China have sent a chill through Canadians who work and travel regularly to the country. Mr. Saint Jacques said he has heard from a number professionals who have postponed business trips to China.

“There is a rising fear that anyone else could be arrested at random, especially since we know China doesn’t have the same definition of national security,” he said. “It is pretty elastic and very broad.”

Extradition can take months in Canada.

First a Canadian judge must be convinced of the case, and then the country’s justice minister must approve. If either decision is appealed, the process can drag on for years, Mr. Currie said.

But, in Ms. Meng’s case, her lawyers could try to get the extradition order quashed preemptively based on political involvement, he said.

“At the moment, both the president of the United States and the government of China seem to be interfering in our legal process,” Mr. Currie said. The government’s priority now, he said, is “defending Canada sovereignty and defending the Canadian legal process.”

What this may mean for the fate of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spovar is unclear at best. But it appears that China’s security apparatus had been monitoring them for awhile.

Mr. Kovrig, the former diplomat, was first secretary and vice consul at Canada’s Beijing embassy from 2014 to 2016. More recently he had been working as a senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization that moved its Beijing office to Hong Kong a few years ago amid tightened Chinese restrictions on such foreign organizations.

He was regarded as a Sinophile, fluent in Mandarin, who had spent years investigating sensitive subjects such as the rights of Chinese ethnic minorities.

Mr. Spovar saw himself as a sort of adventurer, writer, fixer, consultant and mediator between the West and reclusive North Korea.

He helped to arrange a high-profile visit to North Korea in 2016 by Dennis Rodman, the basketball star, and boasted that he had even met Kim Jong-un, the North’s enigmatic leader, and had pohttps://www.webpressnet.comsed for a photograph with him, laughing and shaking hands, that he displayed on social media.

Over the past year, Canada has been trying to start free trade talks with China in an effort to diversify an economy that is heavily reliant on the United States.

But the new North American trade deal finally signed this past fall contained a contentious clause that many saw as a blatant push by the United States to block any free trade deal between China and Canada.

The clause — which became widely known as the “China clause” — laid out consequences for any member country for negotiating another trade deal with “nonmarket economies.”

The Chinese Embassy in Canada saw the clause as an affront. It issued a statement deploring the “hegemonic actions taken by some country which blatantly interferes with other country’s sovereignty.”