The second anniversary of the detention of the two Canadian hostages in China falls this Thursday. Their situation underlines the absence of due process in the PRC’s judicial system, the lengths to which the Communist Party will go to bully overseas governments and it presents an exquisite dilemma for the Canadian government.

But first, a reminder of what’s going on. On 10 December 2018 Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were seized on the Mainland in retaliation for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of the Chinese telecoms conglomerate Huawei and daughter of the company’s founder. She was arrested on a US warrant pending an extradition request based on accusations of breaking American sanctions against Iran.

Ms Meng is not subject to detention in Canada, on the contrary she remains in her luxury home in Vancouver. She has a squad of lawyers and bodyguards at her disposal and is fighting her case in the Canadian courts where not only is there due process but also transparency.

Messers Kovrig and Spavor, on the other hand, have been detained in squalid conditions facing nonspecific charges of espionage. They are regularly denied both consular access and have no legal representation of their own choosing. There is zero transparency in the handling of their cases.

The government in Beijing barely bothers to disguise that the two men are being held hostage and that their fate depends on what happens to Ms Meng. In a speech last Saturday vice-Foreign Minister Le Yucheng, clearly no enemy of irony, said that China had always been a country whose people highly valued etiquette and made harmony a priority.

But no amount of rhetoric can disguise Beijing’s thuggish behavior. Lamentably the response to it has not been helped by the Trump administration which has toyed with playing the hostage game and then adopted a hardline approach towards Huawei which stands accused of being under the Chinese states’ indirect control although it is, at least in theory, a privately-owned company.

A fair-minded observer should also add that the arrest of Ms Meng was heavily tinged with political considerations that feed into the Sino-US trade war. So, there is politics on both sides but that does not mean that China’s shameful behavior can somehow be equated with the way that Canada has handled this case.

Well meaning friends of the detained Canadians suggest that the time has come for Ottawa to also play China’s game and swap the release of Ms Meng for the two hostages detained on the Mainland.

The humanitarian response is to support this proposal because the two men have suffered quite enough and are threatened with even more scary prospects if Ms Meng ends up being extradited.

Yet, and it is a massive yet, if China’s bullying succeeds there is little doubt that other hostages will be taken in future should key PRC nationals get into trouble overseas. Sending a signal that hostage diplomacy works rarely ends with a single instance.

Moreover Canada faces the excruciating problem of undermining its own judicial system if proceedings against Ms Meng are brought to a halt for what are essentially political reasons. Canada is rightly proud of its independent judiciary and there are innumerable repercussions from undermining it.

So, what can be done? There is no easy solution here, only least worse options. The heart says surely it is inhumane for the two Canadians to be left to fester, but the mind says, wait a minute, if they are traded as hostages, what happens the next time China seizes overseas nationals who happen to be on its territory? Even more importantly, can Canada really afford to undermine its own judicial system?

Observing all this from Hong Kong where the survival of an independent judiciary is now in question and where we have also seen Hong Kongers seized off the streets and bundled across the border for detention, the fate of the Canadians comes very close to home.

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse”

Vines’ latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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