Meng, Huawei and the Two Michaels
September 27, 2021
THE BIG STORY here is the release of Huawei bigwig Meng Wanzhou from her captivity in Canada, which has somehow prompted the Chinese authorities to let Canadian citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig out of jail, even though their cases were supposedly “unconnected”.
Most people are interpreting all this as a tacit acknowledgement that Beijing is now prepared to engage in hostage diplomacy in order to get its own way. I suppose one should also acknowledge that the fraud charges against Meng, which involved a Huawei subsidiary accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, were a little irregular. As Patrick Wintour puts it in the Guardian, “No one lost money, the allegations were several years old, and the intended victim, a global bank, knew the truth even as it was allegedly being lied to.”
Still, if we were relying on the Chinese media, we would be unaware of the fact that she has accepted responsibility for many of the U.S. prosecutor’s charges.
Instead, the Chinese press bulges and drips with schmaltz, telling us of a teary-eyed exec returning to “the embrace of the great motherland” after more than a thousand days of unimaginable suffering. We would do well to recall that she was not in jail and lived in comfort, while the two Michaels were detained in solitary confinement. One wag writes on Twitter that if Meng undergoes the requisite 14 days in COVID quarantine upon her return, it will be her most onerous period of confinement since she was first put under house arrest more than three years ago.
The way things are going in China, another wag says, Meng might eventually come to regret leaving Canada.
When she finally arrives in China. Shenzhen airport is filled with patriotic citizens waving banners to celebrate the release of a billionaire’s daughter, and China’s social media is awash with maudlin drivel. In her speech at Shenzhen airport, Meng says: “If faith has a colour, it must be China red.” And if my repulsion had a colour, it would be vomit-yellow.
I read the responses of the hated foreign press, who all make it clear that we could all at any moment be locked up not for anything we have done, but because the state has no limits, no checks and balances, and no meaningful legal protections. We are all pawns. The arrests of Spavor and Kovrig were naked, cynical displays of power by an unaccountable ruling elite. If it can turn on them, it can turn on the rest of us too.
State media still insist that the case against the two Canadians was genuine. I used to think that China, at the very least, was still involved in the fact business, but this was an act of government-sponsored misinformation every bit as cynical as anything the reality-denying Putin regime has been involved in.
