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To get back arrested executive, China uses a hardball tactic: seizing foreigners

Michael Kovrig spoke with his wife, Vina Nadjibulla, after his arrival at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Saturday.Frank Gunn/Associated Press

In a rapid-fire climax to a 1,030-day standoff, China welcomed home a company executive whose arrest in Canada and possible extradition to the United States made her a focus of superpower friction. In getting her back, Beijing brandished a formidable political tool: using detained foreign citizens as bargaining chips in disputes with other countries.

The executive, Meng Wanzhou, landed in China on Saturday night local time to a public that widely sees her as a victim of arrogant American overreach. By the same turn, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, two Canadians detained by Chinese officials just days after Meng had been arrested, were released and arrived in Canada.

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The exchange resolves one of the festering disputes that has brought tensions between Washington and Beijing to their worst point in decades. But it will likely do little to resolve deeper issues, including human rights, a sweeping clampdown in Hong Kong, cyberespionage, China’s threats to use force against Taiwan, and fears in Beijing that the United States will never accept China’s rise.

The swiftness of the apparent deal also stands as a warning to leaders in other countries that the Chinese government can be boldly transactional with foreign nationals, said Donald Clarke, a law professor specializing in China at George Washington University Law School.

“They’re not even making a pretense of a pretense that this was anything but a straight hostage situation,” he said of the two Canadians, who stood trial on spying charges. Spavor was sentenced last month to 11 years in prison, and Kovrig was waiting for a verdict in his case after trial in March.

“In a sense, China has strengthened its bargaining position in future negotiations like this,” Clarke said. “They’re saying, if you give them what they want, they will deliver as agreed.”

Chinese media reports chronicled Meng's release and flight home, skipping over her admission of some wrongdoing or saying that it did not amount to a formal guilty plea. On China’s internet, Meng was praised as a patriotic symbol of China standing up to Western bullying. Her plane was met on the tarmac at the airport in Shenzhen, China, by a rapturous crowd waving Chinese flags.

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“Without a powerful motherland, I would not have my freedom today,” Meng said in a statement issued from her flight.

Chinese news media scarcely mentioned the release of Spavor and Kovrig, leaving the impression that Beijing gave nothing away for her return.

To say that the apparent swap signals a thaw in relations would be premature at best, experts said.

President Joe Biden has designated China as a key challenge to American preeminence. The releases came as he hosted the first face-to-face leaders’ meeting of the Quad, a grouping of the United States, India, Japan and Australia, united by their apprehension about China’s power and intentions in Asia. This month, Biden unveiled a new security agreement with Australia and Britain, and plans to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

While Canadian officials and American prosecutors have insisted that they treated Meng’s case as purely a legal matter, politics has lurked in the background since she was arrested at an airport in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Dec. 1, 2018.

Nine days later, security officers took Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat, from a street in Beijing. Spavor was seized on the same day in Dandong, a Chinese city opposite North Korea, a country where he long did business. While Meng was allowed to live in her Vancouver mansion, the two Canadians were confined to prison under much harsher conditions.

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Chinese officials rejected the idea that Kovrig and Spavor were in effect hostages. But Canadians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, scoffed at their denials, and Chinese officials and media commentators occasionally implied that there could be a trade-off in return for Meng’s release.

The United States alleged that in 2013, Meng lied to a bank over whether Huawei — the telecommunications company founded by her father, Ren Zhengfei, where she was chief financial officer — had kept control of a company that did business in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. Meng’s lawyers argued that she had been truthful.

Despite posturing on both sides, the United States and Meng had some incentive to find common ground, in part because neither felt entirely sure they would win the fight over extraditing her, according to two additional people with knowledge of the talks.

Her attorneys argued that the case against her entailed an abuse of process, notably former President Donald Trump’s comment that he could intervene to secure a trade deal with Beijing.

“Trump made matters worse on several occasions by implying that Huawei could be simply another U.S. bargaining chip in the trade negotiations,” John Bolton, who had served as Trump’s national security adviser, wrote in his memoir.

While the Canadian courts heard arguments, there were hints that Washington and Beijing were trying to find common ground. Negotiations between Meng’s team and the Justice Department began more than a year ago, said one person familiar with the talks.

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At the State Department, the two Canadians appeared to be a priority among human rights cases. When Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, attended talks in China in July, she “raised the cases of American and Canadian citizens,” the department said at the time.

Last week, Biden held a telephone conversation with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Neither side gave details, but Xi’s public comments suggested that he wanted to decrease tensions. The two sides, Xi said, according to China’s official summary, should “bring China-U.S. relations back to the right track of stable development as soon as possible.”

Public resolution, though, may have been slowed by Canada’s recent election. The prime minister, Trudeau, reclaimed office in the election last week, though he failed to win a commanding majority in Parliament.

The Chinese government’s hardball tactics may have been successful in springing Meng, but they appear to have created lasting odium in Canada, showing the political costs of seizing foreign nationals. More than 70% of Canadian respondents to a Pew Research Center poll this year had an unfavorable view of China. Resistance to purchasing Huawei equipment there has grown.

But under Xi, Chinese officials have become bolder in rejecting Western criticism. They have said that Meng’s arrest was rankly political and appeared willing to go to great lengths to ensure that she did not face trial in the United States.

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“This was the political persecution of a Chinese citizen, with the goal of crushing a Chinese high-tech enterprise,” a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, Hua Chunying, said in a statement about Meng on Saturday. “The actions by the United States and Canada were classic arbitrary detention.”

John Kamm, an American businessman who for decades has negotiated with Chinese officials, said that Beijing may also release American nationals held in China as part of the diplomatic give and take. Some are in detention, others under exit bans that block them from leaving China.

“I think now we can hope that there’ll be other shoes dropping — movement on other cases,” Kamm said by telephone.

Meng received a hero’s welcome upon her return, but before she can move around, she will have to first undergo three weeks of quarantine under China’s stringent rules for COVID-19. While in Canada, she stayed in her seven-room gated house in Vancouver and could move around with a tracker device on her left angle.

Kovrig and Spavor landed Saturday morning at Calgary International Airport, where Trudeau and his foreign minister, Marc Garneau, greeted them. Kovrig and Spavor will face a glare of attention and then the hardships of adjusting after years in detention with little human contact.

“Having your movement restricted is still a deprivation of freedom, but the difference between what Meng has experienced and what they went through is night and day,” said Margaret Lewis, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who studies criminal justice in China. “The worst of their ordeal is over, but their wounds will continue.”